


The French Drop

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-21
Updated: 2010-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-12 02:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Eames And Arthur Executive Protection Hour. Gen with mild slash and het overtones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to _Parlor Tricks_ and may not make a whole lot of sense plotwise if you haven't read that one. Major spoilers for the movie and, naturally, for Parlor Tricks. Eames has shorter hair in this fic because he had a haircut prior to Parlor Tricks. Think Tom Hardy's short, spiky haircut. (: Thanks to [heronymus_waat](http://heronymus_waat.livejournal.com/) for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.

Ariadne hadn't really thought about extraction work in months when Eames and Arthur both decided to show back up in her life. It was true that Saito had called her with a couple job offers, and equally true that there was nothing quite like shared dreaming, but she had refused both times due to school and scheduling conflicts. She had had a thesis to finish and now she had its defense to prepare, and she had already spent enough of her time (time that she had been supposed to spend on schoolwork) on the Fischer job.

She had just finished her Tuesday art history elective and had been thinking about a late lunch when she spotted someone waiting in the hallway outside her classroom.

"Hello, Ariadne," Arthur said, as he eased himself off the wall he had been leaning on and walked towards her, carrying a scratched black briefcase in his right hand. Something felt off despite the usual polish of his dress and demeanor, and he was wearing, rather incongruously, a battered leather jacket over a striped dress shirt. His usual carriage was blunted, his shoulders subtly, but uncharacteristically bowed.

"Arthur? What are you doing here?" She looked up at him and found his eyes smudged with dark circles and there was the faintest hint of stubble on his cheeks and chin. Ariadne could not imagine when she had seen Arthur this scruffy. He looked as though he had not slept in days.

"We'll talk about it on the way out," he said. "Let's go."

She watched him head down the stairs with his usual easy stride.

* * *

"You look like hell, Arthur," she said as they walked through the gates at 14 Rue Bonaparte. "Are you all right?"

"I'm just tired," he said. "Driving here was tedious."

"You braved Paris traffic?" She looked at him doubtfully, and then glanced across the street, where a local driver proved her point by darting rather skillfully into a gap in the traffic, cutting off two other individuals as he did so. Paris drivers scared her even more than Boston drivers did, and that took a lot of doing.

"I had to. We started in Katowice," he said as though it explained everything.

"You drove from _Poland_ to get here? And who's 'we'?" she asked.

"Eames. I left him at your apartment."

"You didn't leave him waiting outside, did you? My landlady doesn't like loiterers."

"I'm sure he's found his way in by now."

"At least it's not like there's anything worth stealing in there."

"That's not what we're here for," Arthur said with a faint smile on his face.

* * *

Ariadne's usual route home started with a short walk from 14 Rue Bonaparte to the Metro station at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Today, Arthur took her home by a different route. They walked to the station at Solferino and changed lines on Falguière instead.

"What aren't you telling me about, Arthur?" she asked him quietly, as they stood in the end car of the train. She didn't quite like the way Arthur had crammed her into a corner of the car; she couldn't even look out the train windows like she normally did on the way to and from school. "You didn't make this detour for nothing."

He glanced around, his tired eyes still alert, and then let out a soft sigh. "Your life may be in danger," he said softly in a voice that was just above a whisper.

Ariadne fought to keep from shouting in the spike of anger that followed. "Does this have anything to do with the inception job?" she asked, resenting the tremor in her voice.

"Yes and no. Before Saito hired us we took a job for a South African client. Cobol Engineering. We failed, and for a while Cobb had a price on his head."

Ariadne realized belatedly that Arthur had been interposing himself physically between her and the other passengers in the car. "What did they want?" she asked, her hands icy cold from panic. She stuck her fists in the pockets of her jacket to hide the trembling.

"Plans that Saito kept in his head," Arthur said, with a bleak smile.

"Can't you get them from him?" Her fingers strayed to the doctored bishop she used as a totem, and she gripped it tightly, like a good-luck charm.

"He gave them to Cobb after the Fischer job, and that got rid of them for a time." Arthur looked around himself again, and then leaned wearily against the wall of the train car, still standing between her and everyone else. "Unfortunately I think they're after him again."

"Why would they do that?"

"They were bidding on an oil pipeline project; one that would have covered the entire east coast of the African continent. Their backing evaporated after Fischer dissolved Fischer-Morrow."

"If their problem is with Cobb, then why am I in danger? Wouldn't they go after him or his family instead?"

"Cobb may have retired, but he still has connections; as long as he remains in America, getting to him is going to be difficult. I think they want to burn him by killing us, or worse."

"Did they try to kill you, too?" she asked. He swallowed hard, but did not speak. She grabbed his arm after a minute of silence and squeezed with a little more force than was necessary. He was tense, the muscles of his arm taut under the sleeve of his leather jacket, and she could see the tension build in his jaw and neck. "Arthur."

"In Singapore," he said at last, the words hissing softly in his throat. "They laid quite the trap for me, but I got out."

"What about me?" she asked. She had started to shake a little by then and she wasn't sure if she envied or resented Arthur's own relative calm. "I'm just a grad student. When I accepted Cobb's offer I didn't plan to get involved in stuff like this."

He kept his face cool and composed, but she read a flicker of emotion behind his eyes that could have been rage. "They won't try to make a move on you now that I'm here, and if they try it's going to be very difficult for them to get out of it alive."

* * *

They got off the train at Kléber and walked to her third-floor studio apartment. It consisted of twelve square meters of floor space and sloping walls, built into the garret of a converted prewar house. She had started to reach into a pocket for her keys, but Arthur stepped in front of her and rapped sharply on the door, twice. She heard a soft shuffle, and then the bolt worked. Eames was standing shirtless in her doorway with a towel around his neck. She caught a hint of strong soap and cologne, and his wet hair stood up in short, spiky tufts. In another context she would have started mentally back-tracking through the events of the day to figure if she had been dreaming or not; she suspected strongly that a shirtless Eames had that effect on almost anything with a pulse. After the bombshell Arthur had dropped on her earlier, however it just annoyed and frustrated her to see how comfortable Eames was while she had a price on her head.

"Do you mind, Eames?" Arthur asked, tartly, as he ushered her into the door and shut it behind him. "I asked you to keep an eye on her apartment, not to move in."

"We were stuck in a car with malfunctioning air-conditioning for two days and I didn't want to offend her with my manly stench," he said, reaching up to dry his hair with the towel. His tattoos writhed in the movement of his chest and shoulders, but she was not in any mood to appreciate the sight right now. Instead she sat down in one of the two chairs placed at the fold-down dinette table that was all she had room for in her studio and fixed them both with her best impression of her mother's Stare of Death. "Excuse me. You can continue the Eames and Arthur Show after you've answered my questions."

Arthur tipped his head to the side. "Ask away."

"How did they connect me to you?" she asked. "I can see how they know you're Cobb's partner in the extraction business, and how Eames connects into this, but what made them think, 'Hey, this architecture grad student was in on whatever made Fischer change his mind?'"

"I tried pretty hard to make sure we had solid operational security for this job," Arthur said. "They're probably working off a copy of the passenger manifest from the flight to LA, which places us all in the same first-class cabin as Fischer. I don't know how much they know about what you did, but considering the way they work they might just consider your death acceptable collateral damage as long as it screws with Cobb."

"You don't just get a copy of something like that, right? Aren't the flight authorities supposed to be secure?"

Arthur shook his head at that. "Enough money can get you anywhere, and you should know that." She thought about Saito buying an entire airline, and nodded in response.

"Not to mention that there are other ways of getting reliable intelligence on a passenger list," Eames said, his expression darkening. "The lead flight attendant – she's dead. The authorities in Perth pulled her mangled body out of a wrecked car, but I got hold of the autopsy report and there are some injuries that the coroner couldn't account for."

"They tortured her for the information, and then killed her," Ariadne whispered. Her hands were like knots of ice in her lap. "Cobb's fine, right? What about the others? Yusuf and Saito?

"Yusuf's had to leave Kenya for his own safety. Eames managed to touch base with him in Amsterdam; he's fine. They wouldn't try to mess _physically_ with Saito, but he can hold his own even if they did." Arthur pulled up the other chair in her apartment and sat down beside her, his briefcase on the floor beside his ankle.

"I guess you two are pretty used to being on the run while your lives are in danger, but I'm pretty pissed-off," she said, her voice shaking with a volatile blend of rage and terror. She stood up and began to pace out of a physical urge to move that was so strong it hurt. "Neither you nor Cobb were entirely honest about the consequences when you offered me this job," she said, jabbing a finger in Arthur's direction.

Eames gave her a look, cool and appraising, as he sat down on the edge of her bed. "I know you're upset, love," he said, "but we're not going to let anything happen to you."

"I – Okay," she said, slumping a little as she sat back down in her chair. "So what happens now? I have a bunch of angry people after my life, and you two bodyguard me?"

"In a nutshell, yes," Eames said. "One of us is going to be with you 24 hours a day."

"Like how Arthur walked me home from school. What were you going to do if someone had taken a shot at me then?" she asked, looking from Eames to Arthur, and back again. Arthur picked the briefcase up off the floor and popped its latches with the faintest hint of a smile on his face. Strapped into it was a submachine gun, and Ariadne realized belatedly that the briefcase had a trigger built into its grip.

"I call her Pandora," he said, brushing a bit of lint off the receiver with a fingertip.

"Isn't that a bit much?" she asked, looking at the briefcase doubtfully.

"Silly Ariadne," Eames said with a slow grin. "There is no such thing as overkill, only _how_ you employ it."

"As the Boy Scouts say, 'Be Prepared'," Arthur said as he shut the briefcase.

"Were you a Boy Scout, then, Arthur?" Eames asked. The tone of his voice lent the question a somewhat salacious import.

"Eagle Scout. Not that my father would have let me be anything less." The way Arthur bit off the sentence invited no further comment. She glanced at Eames and half-expected him to supply a witty comeback but he only looked at her with his cool gray gaze and gave a shrug and a tiny shake of his head.

"You're not going to be here forever, are you?" She barely had enough room for herself in this studio apartment, and she wasn't sure how she was going to deal with Eames and Arthur living with her in this space.

"We're going to be shadowing you long enough for you to learn to take care of yourself."

"I hope that isn't going to take up too much of my time, because I have a thesis to defend and electives to finish."

"Fortunately for you," Eames said as he got up and reached down towards the luggage piled beside her bed, "dream-training takes a fraction of the time real-world training does." He drew a PASIV unit out of a slipcase with a flourish.

"I can have each session take no more than fifteen minutes, real-time," Arthur said as he shrugged off his leather jacket and rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt. "Shall we?"

* * *

"Have you ever handled a firearm before?" Arthur asked her, as she looked around the space she was standing in. They were standing in an indoor shooting range made out of dreary concrete and cinderblock. Paper targets were clipped to rails hanging from the ceiling overhead. There was a faintly oily, chemical tinge to the air that she assumed was gun oil or something like that, and above it all was the roar of a ventilation fan, somewhere.

"I shot Mal in Limbo, but I don't think that counts," she said. Arthur handed her a pair of shooting glasses, and she put them on.

"You know, Dom never told me about that," he said thoughtfully, "but no, it wouldn't count. Sometimes you can change the rules in a dream to make your shots go where you expect them to go. That won't work here. I've imposed rules on this particular place so we'll have to work on more than just wishful thinking."

"What's all this ear protection for?" she asked as he handed her both a pair of earplugs and a pair of earmuffs.

"Shooting indoors can get as loud as 140 decibels; it won't permanently deafen you since you're actually dreaming, but it still hurts, and that's not the point of this lesson." He put on his own pair of shooting glasses and ear protectors after she finished putting hers on, and then took her to one of the stations, where he picked up a handgun in both his hands but did not give it to her. "Gun safety rules. First one. Assume all guns are always loaded." He pulled back on the slide of the little handgun and showed it to her. "This one here's a Beretta 1934, and as you can see it's unloaded and there isn't a round in the chamber."

She looked and nodded, and Arthur then held up an empty magazine in one hand and a fistful of rounds in the other. "This is the magazine. It holds the cartridges and feeds them into the chamber after every shot. This one holds seven rounds of .380 ACP." His fingers worked smoothly as he fed each cartridge into the magazine he was holding. He fed the magazine into the well in the pistol grip, and then put it into her hand, his warm, steady fingers folding hers around the grip. "Second gun safety rule: Keep your finger off the trigger until and unless you're ready to shoot." The little pistol was surprisingly dense in her hands. A bloom of condensation marked the outlines of her fingertips in the cool metal.

"Like this?" she said, looking down at the gun she was now holding in both hands, her left hand bracing her right. Arthur nodded, and he guided her hands up until she raised it and pointed it downrange at the paper target.

"Not bad, which brings us to rules three and four. Don't ever point your gun at anything you're not willing to kill or destroy." he said. He shifted and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder, his own chest close enough to her back that she could feel the warmth of his body through his clothes. A spicy, peppery hint of juniper and frankincense travelled upwards on his body heat; he was always warm enough to feel feverish, even in dreams. She imagined that he possessed the metabolism of a ferret. "Always make sure what your target is," he told her, "and what is behind it. In this setup the wall behind us is packed, bermed earth. Shots will lodge in it safely. Out in the open things aren't always so certain, and even in a room a bullet can go through drywall to kill the person in the apartment next door."

Arthur had her stand with her feet slightly apart, wider than her shoulders, with her weight resting mostly on the balls of her feet, and then showed her how to line up the sight blades with the center of the target. "You'll want to squeeze down on the trigger instead of jerking back with your finger," he said. "That way your shots will stay accurate because you're not cocking the barrel upwards." She rested her finger lightly on the trigger, and then pulled back when he nodded. The shot was louder than she had expected even through the ear protection, and the recoil stung, just a little, in her hands.

"Again," Arthur said, and she fired shots at the target until she had squeezed off all seven shots and the little pistol rested slide-locked in her hands. She put the empty gun down on the counter at the shooting station and worked the tingle out of her fingers as he pushed down on a button. The paper target came towards them on the rail it had hung from, and Ariadne had to fight a spike of self-consciousness as it came closer to her.

"Five out of seven," she said, feeling a flush rise in her face. Only one of her shots had landed in the central ring of the target's man-silhouette, and she was starting to feel rather incompetent.

"That one's pretty good," he said, transfixing one of the holes with a pen he had pulled out of a pocket. "You would probably have gotten his liver, maybe even nicked his descending aorta if you were lucky. I did worse than you when I first learned to shoot."

"How'd you get good then?" she asked as she watched him pop the spent magazine from the Beretta and reload it from a box of cartridges he had pulled out of a shelf beneath the shooting station.

"Lots of drills and range time courtesy of the US Air Force, and I started admitting that I didn't know everything about everything." He replaced the paper target in the hanger with a fresh one.

"You don't know everything?" she asked with mock horror, and he smiled as he handed the Beretta back to her. She took it with more confidence this time and settled into the modern isosceles stance he had taught her to adopt.

"Let's try this again," he said, sending the target back downrange with a press of a button.

* * *

Ariadne estimated that she had been shooting at targets for nearly two subjective hours when she woke up in her own apartment. She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the sloped ceiling right above her narrow little bed for a few minutes before she got up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her foot struck something soft and she heard a muffled curse from Arthur, who had been lying on the hardwood floor beside her bed.

"Sorry," she said, tucking her feet up while he sat up and pulled the needles from his wrist.

Eames had put on a t-shirt while she had been dreaming and was sitting in one of the two chairs in the room, reading one of the _Hellblazer_ trade paperbacks she had kept in her bookshelf. "How was it?" he asked, marking his page with a slip of paper that looked like a printed-out sales receipt.

"It was okay, I think," she said as she freed herself from the IV and its tether. "At least I know what not to do now."

"It was better than okay," Arthur said as he reeled the IV lines back into the PASIV. "You actually probably would be a fairly good shot with more range time."

"So talented, our Ariadne," Eames said with a gentle smile. "Are you two hungry at all? I was thinking of getting some take-away for dinner."

"Actually, yeah," she said. "I haven't eaten since breakfast today."

"You seem to be feeling better," said Arthur. "Unless you're one of those people who can still eat while pissed-off."

"I'm not done with that yet, okay?" she said. She wobbled a little with a dizzy head rush as she climbed out of her bed. "If I get out of this alive I'm going to fly to LA to scream at Cobb in person."

"You'll live," Eames said, his smirk confident and infuriating, "I'll go with you if you want someone to hold him down while you kick him in the bollocks."

"Language, Eames," Arthur said, mildly.

* * *

Arthur sent Eames out for takeout while he worked on securing Ariadne's apartment.   
"What I'd love to know," he said as he installed an alarm in her front door, "Is how you managed to afford an apartment in 16e on a grad student's stipend."

"My mother knows Mme Arnaud from way back," she said half-absently as she frowned at her word processor. "She let me have this room for cheap because it's the crappiest one in the building. Five-hundred and fifty Euros a month doesn't get me central air or heating, but I have an electric space heater and the other guy on this floor has to pay twelve hundred Euros for his space." She was now sitting at her dinette table, tapping away at the keyboard of her new MacBook, the one indulgence she had allowed herself from her share of the inception take. She was frustrated and nervous enough that she found it hard to work, but she also doubted that her instructors would accept the potential of death or kidnap as an excuse for late homework, and she had a paper due in three days.   
Arthur had been kneeling barefoot on her bed while he worked on the window when she heard him make a small sound of surprise, one answered by a small mew. She couldn't help smiling as she turned in her chair to see him glancing suspiciously at the big orange cat that had just climbed in through her window.

"Is this your cat?" he asked, as the cat jumped off the bed and walked towards Ariadne.

"Nope," she said as she picked it up in her arms. That was enough to start it purring loudly. "This is my landlady's cat. He visits all the apartments from time to time. I think he thinks he's the custodian of the building."

"Wonderful," he muttered. "Look. Can you keep this window shut for the time being? It's a security risk. Someone armed with a decent rifle would have a shot at you from any of the buildings across the street."

"I don't have central air, remember? I'll roast in here with the window shut. I can keep the curtains drawn but – you're not allergic to cats, are you?" she asked, watching him carefully as the cat purred in her arms and butted its head against her chin.

"I'll live," he said bleakly.

* * *

Eames came back with pad thai and foam cups of Thai iced tea, strong and sweet. "Are you using those bloody glass bottles as security again?" he asked Arthur when Ariadne let him in.

"I like having some kind of backup like this," Arthur said after Eames had shut the door. He had demonstrated the trick to Ariadne earlier. He had put an empty, upturned Snapple bottle by the front door and it had tipped over with a hollow clunk when she had opened the door to let the cat out. Apparently this trick didn't work quite as well with other bottle shapes. Beer bottles tipped too easily; jam jars not often enough. He had already installed a door alarm that whined shrilly if the door was opened before it was disarmed, but electronic security could easily be circumvented with the right tools and skill set.

"One day I'm going to step on one of those and break my neck," Eames said, nudging the offending bottle aside with the toe of his sneaker.

"Maybe you should pay more attention to what's going on under your feet," Arthur said as he took the takeout boxes from Eames and carried them to the dinette table. Ariadne scrambled to collect her notebook and put it away before someone spilled something on it.

"I hope you guys realize that there's only two places at the dinner table," she said as she put her Mac to sleep and left it on top of her bed.

"I can sit on the floor," Eames said. He took one of the cartons of noodles and a cup of tea and sat cross-legged by her bed.

"You're not going to both live here with me, right?" she asked. Arthur handed Eames a pair of disposable chopsticks, and then sat down opposite her at the table.

"What?" Arthur said, his chopsticks freezing halfway to his mouth as he thought about her question. "No, we're going to be trading shifts."

"Delightful as you are, Ariadne love," Eames said through a mouthful of noodles, "we need downtime too."

"Good, because there isn't enough room in this apartment for the both of you."

"Agreed," Arthur said, and she could only stare over her pad thai at the utter gall.

"The next time you decide to trawl universities for an architect maybe you could pick someone with a larger apartment," she said, rather tartly.

"Point taken. I guess I should have paid attention to that when I did the background check." Arthur went back to eating his dinner, rolling the fried noodles in neat bundles around his chopsticks before he ate them. The ends of the chopsticks were mismatched, as though he had trouble splitting them neatly, but then, so did she.

"Does that mean there's going to be a new entry in the checklist you have whenever you assemble a team? 'Number thirty-four, make sure architect has flat larger than twenty square meters?'" Eames asked. He had finished his pad thai and was now working on his cup of iced tea.

"Not exactly like that," Arthur said after he had swallowed his mouthful of noodles. Ariadne had never seen him talk with his mouth full in the time she had worked with him.

"I'm almost afraid to ask what you know about my background," she said, before she picked up a shrimp from her cartoon of noodles and ate it.

"Nothing a future employer of yours wouldn't have been able to look up. Education verification, credit check, identity and address verification."

"You didn't check my criminal history?" she asked. She knew extraction wasn't exactly legal, but she thought that Arthur would have at least checked to see how amenable she was to bribery.

"That's because you didn't have one that showed up on records, anyway." Eames said with a slow grin. "And don't look at me like that, Ariadne. It's only natural that I would do a little research into anyone I was expected to work with."

Ariadne sighed then and ate another mouthful of noodles while she wondered about the practicality of paying cash for everything from now on.

* * *

Eames left her flat shortly after dinner, leaving Arthur behind to guard her through the night.

"I don't want you to take this the wrong way," she told him as she threw the takeout containers in the trash, "But I don't think there's enough room in my bed for the both of us, and I'm just talking about you. I don't think Eames could fit in it even if I wasn't here."

Arthur's smile was lopsided as put the Snapple bottle back beside the door. "I'll take the floor," he said before he knelt down by the luggage Eames had left behind on the floor near her bed. The items consisted of an overnight bag, the PASIV device and a lumpy cylinder that he soon unfolded into a sleeping bag.

"Is that okay?" she asked, wondering for a moment how old Arthur actually was. She didn't ask. Instead she gnawed at a hangnail and watched the lines on his face smooth themselves out as the smile faded. He could have been anywhere from an old 17 to a youthful 37, but he tended to carry himself as though he rested on the older end of the spectrum.

"I've slept in worse places," he said. His back was to her and she could see the grip of a pistol sticking out of a holster inside the waistband of his trousers. She wondered how many guns he had hidden on his person for that short trip back from the university.

"With or without sedatives?" she asked at last when she collected her MacBook and sat back down at the dinette table.

"Without." He pulled a paperback from his overnight bag and sat, crosslegged, on the floor beside her bed to read, his fingers leafing delicately through the pages of _The Yiddish Policemen's Union._

* * *

It was nearly ten by the time Ariadne had finished the first draft of her paper. She was staring blearily at her citations page when Arthur marked his page and put his book down. She watched him root through his overnight bag for a towel, a change of clothing and a toiletries bag.

"I was thinking of making a cup of tea or something," she said as he stopped by the dinette table to look at her work. "Do you want one?"

"How late are you going to stay up working on this?" he asked, concern flickering across his face.

"As late as it takes," she said, rubbing at her eyes.

Arthur only crooked an eyebrow in her direction as he vanished into her bathroom. The shut door and the hiss of water pouring out of the shower jet did not entirely stifle the sound of his voice, and she went back to organizing her citations while he serenaded her with what sounded like an ironic rendition of _Poker Face_. She couldn't help smiling to herself as she put her MacBook away and put the kettle on for some chamomile tea.

* * *

"I didn't think you liked Lady GaGa," Ariadne said when Arthur stepped out of her bathroom. She watched the tips of his ears flush just slightly as he carried his clothes back out to the overnight bag. He had changed into a t-shirt and a pair of loose, drawstringed flannel pajama pants, and his wet hair hung heavily over his eyes.

"She's not something I normally listen to," he said as he laid his guns out (one, two, three) on the floor by the sleeping bag.

"But you listen to her enough to sing along in the shower," she teased, as she poured a cup of tea and pulled out a packet of shortbread fingers from the cabinet. She hesitated for a moment, and then poured another cup of tea for Arthur.

"Only because I was stuck in a car with Eames for two days." He sat down on the other chair and took the cup of tea, but shook his head when she offered him some shortbread. "No thanks," he said, "I already brushed my teeth."

"Eames likes Lady GaGa?" This was unexpected but not impossible; the image of Eames listening to _The Fame Monster_ wasn't as cognitively dissonant as Arthur singing _Poker Face,_ or God forbid, _Bad Romance._

"And The Smiths, and Queen, and Franz Ferdinand. At least, that's what he was listening to when we drove here." Arthur sighed softly in exhaustion after he had drained half the cup and she watched his spine relax slightly as he sank back into the chair, which creaked softly under him. "I'm probably going to lie down after I'm done with this," he said, his face framed with wisps of steam drifting up from the cup of herbal tea.

"I might work on this for a bit more," Ariadne said, gesturing at her laptop. "Is it okay if I keep the lights on?"

"That's okay," he said, before he drained his cup.

* * *

Ariadne finally stopped work somewhere close to midnight and staggered to bed after a short, hot shower. Arthur was still half-awake in his sleeping bag, his Michael Chabon novel held inches from his nose as he flipped through the pages. He was close enough to falling asleep that the book threatened to slip from his fingers and hit him in the face more than once. He blinked sleepily as she climbed into her bed.

"Goodnight," she told him as she turned the lights out and pulled the sheets over herself.

"Mm. 'Night," he murmured drowsily as he put the book down and rolled over with a soft rustle.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is genderfuck in this chapter, plus implications about Arthur's personal life (and by extension, Eames' personal life.)

Eames showed up early the next morning, his arrival preceded by a text message that told her she was on his way. Her cellphone pinged its notification just as she stepped out of the shower while Arthur lay half-asleep, huddled in his sleeping bag.

"Was that Eames?" he had asked, propping himself up on an elbow as she checked the text message, his voice slightly hoarse from what she presumed was residual sleep. His hair had dried in the night and now stuck out in the most ridiculous swoops and curls. A cowlick poked extravagantly from the back of his head, and she realized now why he put all that pomade in his hair.

"Oh my God, Arthur. You look like Robert Smith," she said, her left hand over her mouth as she fought a ridiculous fit of giggling.

"Robert Smith," he gasped, his voice between a cough and a sneeze.

"The Cure, Arthur," she said.

"I know who he is. I just think you're mistaken about the resemblance," he said, just before he sneezed again, twice more.

"Are you okay?" she asked, studying his reflection in the mirror of her dresser table as she ran a brush through her damp hair and then pulled it back in a silver barette.

"Did you know your landlady's cat came in through the window last night?" he asked her as he grabbed another change of clothing from his overnight bag.

"He does that," she said as she packed her backpack for school.

"Well, _he_ decided to sleep on my face, and he came back after I shooed him away,"

"That just means he likes you."

"He can go like someone who isn't allergic to him," Arthur grumbled as he staggered to the bathroom.

* * *

Eames showed up at her door while Arthur was still in the shower, and she checked the peephole, moved the Snapple bottle and disabled the alarm before she let him in. He was dressed more formally today in a striped shirt with an open collar and a faded corduroy jacket. He held a tray with four cups of coffee in one hand, and a brown paper bag in the other.

"Good morning," he said, grinning brightly as she shut the door behind him.

"Four cups of coffee?" she asked as he handed her the tray.

"Arthur needs at least two cups before he's actually awake," he explained as he put the paper bag down on the countertop in her galley kitchen. "Where is your frying pan, love?" he asked, as she watched him pull out a half dozen eggs in a carton and two soggy parcels wrapped in butcher paper.

"Bottom right hand cabinet. Eames, what are you doing?" She put the cups of coffee down on the dinette table and appropriated one for herself.

"Making breakfast," he said cheerfully. A carton of mushrooms and a can of baked beans came out of the paper bag next. "How do you like your eggs?"

"Over easy," she said on reflex as she stared at the growing pile of groceries on her kitchen counter. A brace of tomatoes and what looked like a large blood sausage joined the bacon, eggs, baked beans and mushrooms on the counter.

"Unfertilized, please," she heard Arthur say as he stepped out of the bathroom, his hair tamed by a fresh application of pomade. He had started to look more like himself now that he had showered and shaved and changed into dressier clothing.

"You don't ovulate, Arthur," Ariadne said, confused. Eames' only reply was a dry chuckle as he dropped a few rashers of bacon into the melted butter in her frying pan.

"No, I'm referring to the stunt he pulled back in Manila with the hard-boiled duck embryos." Arthur picked up his Glock 17 and tucked it away in the holster behind his right hip. The two smaller pistols went into an ankle holster and a pocket holster, respectively.

"Aren't SERE graduates supposed to eat everything?" She still wasn't entirely sure on _what exactly_ Arthur had done in his time with the Air Force, but Eames had once told her about Arthur's survival and evasion qualifications.

"Only if we don't have a choice. I don't get off on eating rotting zebra carcass like Bear Grylls does."

"Don't be such a big girl's blouse, Arthur," Eames said, the tone of his voice slightly peevish. He dished out the rashers of bacon and then cracked three eggs into the pan, where they sizzled in the mixture of butter and bacon fat.

* * *

The full English breakfast was, apparently, a meal based mostly on sodium and grease. Some fried mushrooms and blackened slices of tomato sat in the middle of each plate, in a half-hearted nod towards the food pyramid. Ariadne only managed to finish the egg, half her sausage, a single rasher of bacon and the baked beans on toast before she called it quits.

"I can't do this any more," she told Eames. A slight queasy feeling was building up in the pit of her stomach and she eyed the remaining food on her plate with a vague sense of apprehension.

"Not a fan of fry-ups, are we?" he asked as he snagged a slice of black pudding off her plate.

"Not in this _quantity_ ," she protested, weakly. She had the unpleasant suspicion that if someone actually shot her now she would probably ooze slowly instead of bleeding.

"I can help you finish it," Arthur said. He had let Eames have the other chair and had eaten his breakfast standing up at her kitchen counter instead.

"You're already _done_?" She couldn't see Arthur's plate from where she was sitting, but he had finished one cup of coffee and was working on a second.

"Bloody skinny bastard," Eames muttered as he cut one of the slices of black pudding in half, "eats more than me and it never shows."

They split the contents of her plate between them. Eames took the rest of the black pudding and the sad-looking tomato slices, Arthur the bacon, sausage and the fried mushrooms.

* * *

"I'll be walking you to school today," Eames said after he had finished eating. He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief and stood up from his seat to collect the submachine gun in its briefcase while Arthur did the dishes.

"You'd let Eames touch your girlfriend?" she asked him as he rinsed the plates off in the sink. He snorted, once, at her question and turned the water off.

"We have an open relationship, and I trust her to practice safer shooting," he said with a wry smile and the faintest hint of a blush.

"Do you hear that, Eames?" Ariadne asked as she collected her backpack, "Behave yourself around Arthur's gun."

His only response was a deep laugh as he led the way out of her door, and they left Arthur behind in her apartment, drying the dishes. They were halfway down the stairs when she froze and realized that Arthur didn't have a key to her apartment.

"Wait," she told Eames. "I don't know if Arthur can lock up after he leaves."

"Of course he can," Eames said. "What do you take us for?"

"But I have both copies of the –" Her protest was cut short when Eames plucked a shiny new copy of her apartment key from a trouser pocket and held it before her.

"Never mind." She had things figured out by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs. Eames had, most probably, taken an impression of her apartment key while she had been dreaming her firearms training, and had used the mold to make duplicates after he had left for the day. She knew that she should have been disturbed by the ease with which he had pulled it off, but now she was just glad to have him and Arthur on her side.

* * *

Her day at school was oddly ordinary, considering the rather unusual circumstances. She had wanted to let herself forget and to just go through this day like any other, but Eames' constant quiet presence was at once reassuring and a reminder that the course of her life was currently slightly askew.

"How do you cope with this?" she asked him, as they stood on the rooftop where she had drawn a maze for Cobb, nearly a year ago. "This paranoia, always having to watch your back."

"Some of us are naturally nasty, paranoid people, Ariadne," Eames had said while he squinted into the distance, his gaze casting over the rooftops of Paris. "Extraction work draws all kinds of interesting personalities to it. That and I probably would have had the sense not to take the Cobol job." He held one of his cigarettes in his hand but had not lighted it yet.

"Probably?" she asked, before she took a bite out of her sandwich.

"I like to think I'm a reasonably careful man," Eames said, his face thoughtful and saturnine, "but I remember what someone once told me years ago. 'Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal adapter on it.' Pile the lucre high enough and any number of fools will think it a decent gamble, myself included."

"Cobb didn't do it for money, though," Ariadne said after she had spent a moment thinking of what Eames had said. "He did it because he was trying to get back to his children."

"The money was just a means to an end, and the end was his motive. Stupid decision, though, which leads us to this." He pulled his lighter from a pocket and flicked it experimentally. The stiff breeze blowing over the parapet overwhelmed the tiny flame almost immediately.

"How about you? Isn't there anyone you care enough about that you'd do something like that for them?" she asked. She sometimes thought of Arthur as not having been born as much as assembled in the manner of a forged ID, but Eames, with his easy, insouciant manner, had felt more _authentic_ , as though he had come from somewhere.

"I do not generally involve myself in the business of giving a shite, Ariadne," The hint of iron in his voice reminded her that the charm was, at times as much a front as the forgeries he put on in dreams. "Caring about someone means they can be used against you."

"What about this? Coming to Paris to make sure I'm okay?" she asked.

"This is business. Anyone who's willing to kill me in an attempt to get Arthur is a bloody fool who deserves what's coming to them," Eames said around his cigarette as he turned half away from her, cupping his lighter flame in his hands.

"Which is?"

Eames only smiled, his expression oddly and uncharacteristically icy as he brought his index finger to his lips. "Shh," he said. The ember on the end of the cigarette winked as he took a deep drag on it, wisps of smoke curling out his nostrils and about his face before the wind snatched them away.

* * *

She came home from school to find Arthur waiting in her apartment. The intense aroma of garlic, anchovies and tomatoes wafted out about him as he opened the door for her, holding a red-stained wooden spoon in his left hand.

"How was your day?" he had asked her when she came into the room with Eames bringing up the rear. She could only stand and stare at the sight of Arthur wearing her blue gingham apron over his shirt, tie, and dress pants.

"Long," she said after a moment of exhausted bafflement, before she decided that she was too tired to even care. "You know how it is. You spend weeks working on something, you bring it in for a review session, and your professor rips it apart and then tells you how you can spend the next few days putting it back together."

"This is constructive criticism, one would assume," Eames said as he shut the door behind him and sat down in one of the chairs at her dinette table while she dropped her backpack by her bed. He left the briefcase by his seat, which was where Arthur had left it the evening before.

"Well, this is fine art. If they weren't trying to be constructive I doubt they'd have given me instructions on how to put it back together." She noticed, then, that Arthur had, rather thoughtfully, brought a folding chair upstairs so someone wouldn't have to sit on the floor this time. The dinette table was still too small for three diners, though, which meant that someone would probably have to eat at the kitchen counter again.

"I hope you don't mind pasta for dinner," Arthur said after the both of them had settled down on opposite sides of her dinette table. He had left his jacket hanging off the back of one of her chairs, and she watched mutely as he drained the spaghetti noodles and tasted the sauce he had left simmering in a saucepan. The knotted apron strings were an incongruous contrast to his polished dress and the matte black pistol grip rising from his waistband.

"That depends on what it's going to be," she said.

 _"Spaghetti alla puttanesca,_ " Arthur said, "anchovies, garlic, capers, olives, crushed tomatoes, peppers. I like to throw some cooked or canned fish in for protein." His Italian accent was excellent, and she wondered where he had learned to speak it.

"I didn't think you could cook," she said after he had handed a glass of water from the jug she kept in the refrigerator, and then turned his attention back to the draining pasta.

"I know just enough to get by," he said as he dished out platefuls of spaghetti and then dropped chunks of canned salmon onto the plates. "Boil noodles, make sauce. Beats frying everything because I don't know what else to do with it."

Eames shot Arthur an offended look but chose not to protest; something that Ariadne thought wise, since Arthur was the one who had prepared and was serving dinner.

* * *

They ate in silence for the most part. Arthur chose to eat standing at the kitchen counter again, and he kept the apron on as he ate. The noodles were _al dente_ ; the sauce was intense with the fishy tang of anchovies, the pungency of garlic and the sweetness of slow-cooked tomatoes, laced with a subtle bite of spiciness.

"You were lying, weren't you, Arthur?" Eames had asked after his first bite.

Arthur glanced up at him from beneath his eyelashes, as though alarmed, before he chewed and swallowed. "What about?"

"About not knowing how to cook more than this. You're showing off."

"It's not like I can make proper hollandaise sauce from scratch," Arthur said, a little embarrassed. "Every time I try the emulsion breaks."

"You're working off a different definition of 'cooking', Arthur," Ariadne said. "Most of us think putting a Pop-Tart in the toaster is cooking."

"That's not cooking. That's not even _assembly_ ," Arthur protested, a hint of disgust apparent in the tone of his voice.

"And you say you can't cook," Eames said after he had eaten another forkful of spaghetti.

* * *

Eames brought out the PASIV after they had eaten, and he started to set it up for another training session while Arthur cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink. He wiped his wet hands on the apron and then took it off, hanging it on a hook on the kitchen wall.

"Three IV lines," Ariadne said as she watched Eames work. "The both of you today?"

"I'm going to need Arthur's assistance for this one," Eames had said with a faint, knowing smirk. "You'll see why later."

She lay down on her bed and looked up at the ceiling after she had swabbed her wrist and hooked herself up to the PASIV. Arthur was next, and he sat down with his back to the frame of her bed. Eames stretched himself out full-length on the hardwood floor of his apartment, but before he did so he unclipped the holster of his gun from his belt and laid it on the floor beside him so it wouldn't dig into his back.

"Are you ready?" Arthur asked, quietly.

"Yeah," Ariadne said. Eames pushed the button and the sleep plucked at her eyelids and pulled her under into a world of gauzy gray, and then blood-lit blackness.

* * *

This time Ariadne found herself sitting in a window seat in what looked like the hall of a large manor house. She could not identify the style in which it had been built without a good look at the outside, but the furnishings and interior setting seemed to point at the 1810s, which made Georgian architecture a likely choice. The furniture in the room had been moved to the sides of the room, most of it covered with dusty drapes. In their place was a large padded mat in the middle of the worsted carpet, and a waning fire licked at ash and embers in the fireplace.

Arthur was draped languidly over an overstuffed chaise lounge, and the dim firelight winked off his cufflinks as he stood up and shed his suit jacket.

"Where is Eames?" she asked as she stood up and joined Arthur on the other side of the room.

"He should be here soon enough," Arthur said as he left his jacket on the armchair and then took his cufflinks off and rolled his sleeves up.

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting." A woman's voice, soft and velvety, came from the hallway outside the room. She came in, and Ariadne saw that she was roughly the same height as herself, and she wore a tank top over a sports bra and a pair of loose drawstring pants.

"Eames?" Ariadne asked after a moment of dumb silence. She noticed that while the woman's toenails had been painted the color of frost plums, her fingernails were plain and short, and there was a sinewy spareness to her forearms that suggested a violent, wiry strength.

"One and the same," the woman said. Green eyes gleamed mischievously from a heart-shaped face framed by a mass of soft blond curls. "We thought it'd be easier to teach you how to defend yourself in hand-to-hand if you had someone of your relative build demonstrate the movements."

Arthur rubbed at his temples as though he had a headache, and then he undid the knot of his necktie and pulled it out from under his shirt collar. "I know this is necessary, Mr. Eames, but I would appreciate it if you kindly avoided forging any of my exes while you did it."

The blonde laughed, a single pealing note like a bell, and then she wasn't. The change was instantaneous and seamless, like two reels of film being spliced together. Eames was now a deeply tanned Chinese woman in an oversize t-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, her shiny black hair pulled back in a severe ponytail.

"Is this better?" she asked Arthur, her voice now not so much velvet as much as whisky and smoke.

"I don't even know how you managed to get close enough to forge Lee," Arthur said as he undid his shirt collar.

"You know as well as I do that forgery does not require the forger to know the subject in a Biblical manner," Eames said, her smile now smug, her teeth startlingly white against the brown of her face.

"No," Arthur said as he walked over to stand in the middle of the practice mat. "You just prefer to when the subject's pretty enough."

"True enough, but alas, Ms. Lee is faithful to her wedding vows, _and_ I once watched her kill a man with a knitting needle. I would not presume to persuade her otherwise," Eames said, beckoning Ariadne to follow as she joined Arthur on the practice mat. "I doubt you have much experience in hand-to-hand combat."

"Not unless hitting another kid with a metal lunchbox in middle school counts."

"Well, not really," Eames said, "but it does mean you have the right mindset for this. In the real world you want to fight fast, fight hard, and fight them with everything you have to hand. Fair play is for dead people."

Arthur struck then, as though to emphasize what Eames had said. His movements were swift and snakelike as he grabbed Eames' hair from behind in a vicious hold. Eames reached up with both hands and seized Arthur's wrist, pivoting towards him on her heel and twisting his arm backwards. She then stepped neatly away from him and dragged his hand out of her hair, and followed up with a vicious stomp to the spine, her foot stopping an inch from the nape of his neck after he had fallen on the mat.

"You don't have to be enormously strong to pull this off," Eames said after she had taken her foot off Arthur's neck and helped him up, "nor will dream training increase your physical strength and dexterity. What we're going to teach you is something simpler."

"What Eames is doing," Arthur said, "is she's using the geometry of my body against me."

"Right," Ariadne said. "The forearm only rotates so much before you start straining the ligaments of the elbow, and when the elbow and shoulder reach the limits of their articulation my opponent has to follow if he doesn't want his arm dislocated." Which would screw up his ability to fight anyway, but she didn't think it needed saying.

"Very good," Arthur said. "You know your anatomy."

"Yeah, well, I took a couple life drawing electives and my professor actually had us get a copy of Gray's Anatomy for reference."

"And people say fine art is useless," Eames smirked.

* * *

Eames had Arthur take hold of Ariadne's hair in a firm but gentle hold as she walked her through the movements of the release. She could feel Arthur's fingers against her scalp and the pulse of his wrist as she took hold of his arm and turned.

"On your left heel and inwards, towards him," Eames said, and Arthur loosened his grip as she twisted his arm, so he wouldn't pull her hair out by the roots. He let his knees buckle and fell on the padded mat once Ariadne had completed her turn. "Once you have your opponent in this position you can try to break his neck with your body weight, or kick him in the throat. The human neck is full of things we really shouldn't break, and you stand a decent enough chance of crushing his trachea and killing him if you do it right."

Ariadne let go of Arthur's wrist then, and he stood up, working the tension out of his shoulder and elbow.

* * *

Eames had Ariadne practice the hold-release several more times, increasing the speed of the movements each time until she had learned to grab, twist and kick in one smooth jerk of action.

"I'm going to need to take a break," Arthur said after the seventh takedown. His mouth had compressed itself into a thin line and his brow was furrowed with pain from the abuse his arm had taken.

"I'm sorry," Ariadne said as he reached up with his left hand and massaged his shoulder through the fabric of his shirt.

"You don't ever need to apologize for this," he said as he regained his feet and staggered over to the chaise lounge.

"Well, I wouldn't if you were actually trying to hurt me, but I guess I feel kinda bad that we've turned you into our punching bag."

"Better your punching bag here than in reality," Arthur said with a lopsided shrug and a faint smile, and Ariadne had smiled too, relieved.

* * *

The rest of the training session had been basic blows and kicks, and Eames taught Ariadne a knife-hand strike that could be applied to weak points on the human body such as the throat and the wrist, and an open-palmed chin-jab that could shift easily into an eye-gouge. She struck again and again at Eames, who deflected the blows with careful hands while Arthur critiqued her technique from the sidelines.

"You really need to stop telegraphing your jabs like that," he had said, ten subjective minutes before they were scheduled to wake. "Whenever you pull your hand back you advertise your intention to strike."

"Show me how you do it, then, because I think _I_ need a break, too." Ariadne said, breathless and flushed with exertion. Eames glanced at Arthur and nodded, shifting mid-gesture to his own form, dressed in the stonewashed jeans and Smiths t-shirt he had worn yesterday. He stood barefoot in the middle of the practice mat and waited.

"Step aside, Ariadne," Arthur said, as he stepped onto the mat and stood before Eames. She backed off and sat down on the chaise lounge, and then they started to spar.

Arthur lunged first, swift and slippery, the knuckles of his right hand curled for a strike to the larynx but Eames turned himself slightly to the left and the punch slipped past his head. He reached up to grab hold of Arthur's wrist but Arthur broke free, twisting against his thumb in a single smooth movement and finishing the turn with a side kick aimed at the inside of Eames' ankle.

Eames shifted in response to the kick and took the blow on the shin instead. He followed that up with a vicious jab upwards with the heel of his palm, and Ariadne heard Arthur's teeth clack as the blow landed. He had executed the jab perfectly; there had been no warning of his strike until his palm had thrust upward against Arthur's jaw.

"You're pulling your punches, Arthur. Did all that practice tire you out?" Eames asked sweetly as he stepped back outside of Arthur's striking range.

"If you want a real fight, I'll give you one, Mr. Eames," Arthur said, as he wiped at his bloody lip with the back of his hand. Eames smirked and beckoned, and then Arthur darted in beneath his reach and kicked him in his bruised shin, terminating the movement with a vicious heel-first smash on Eames' instep. He followed the kick with a knee to the groin that Eames deflected with a half-turn, and then turned Eames' punch aside with the back of his hand.

"This is more like it," Eames had wheezed, a painful grin on his face as Arthur spoiled his movements constantly, denying him the room he needed to hit hard.

Some people described fights as dances, but what Ariadne was seeing was not a dance. This was fractured and ugly and fluid, the displacement of air around their bodies punctuated with the staccato smack of blows landing on flesh. Eames' movements were more straightforward, his punches weighted with the heft of his body behind them. Arthur was at a disadvantage where reach and weight were concerned, but he stepped and dodged with a certainty and grace that would have been beautiful save for the utter brutality of his strikes.

* * *

Ariadne wasn't sure how long they would have continued fighting like this if the timer hadn't run out, and she was vaguely disappointed when she opened her eyes to find herself staring at the ceiling again.

"You bloody show-off," Eames said with a chuckle as he sat up and pulled the needles from his wrist.

"Speak for yourself, Mr. Eames," Arthur said as he struggled to hide the smile on his face. He pressed down on the skin of his own wrist with a thumb until the bleeding stopped, and then checked his watch. "I have to go. Yves is expecting me."

"Send my regards," Eames said. Arthur stood up and collected his suit jacket, and he nodded politely at Ariadne before he walked out the door.

* * *

"How are you feeling now?" Eames asked her. He sat cross-legged beside her as she sat up and disconnected the IV.

"I'm still a little scared, I guess, but I feel better. Like I'm not completely helpless." The barette in her hair had started to slide loose, and she tugged it loose with an impatient jerk.

"Good, because that's exactly what we're trying to do here," he said with a crooked smile. "I don't want you dependent on either of us. I want you able to fight for yourself." He shifted and tucked his feet under himself as though he was going to get up, but she took hold of his wrist and stopped him before he could.

"Hm?" His wrist was cool and dry, a contrast to the feverish warmth of Arthur's skin.

"I don't know if this is something I shouldn't ask, but – Eames, what is it like to be a woman?"

"Wouldn't you already know that?" he asked as he sat back down beside her bed.

"No, I mean," she said, frowning as she thought, "What is it like, from a man's point of view? Does how you feel change when you forge someone in a dream, or is it just visual and tactile for us, the viewers?"

"Mmm." Eames' eyes were hooded as he tried to formulate an answer. "This is something like trying to describe the colors of the Sistine Chapel to a man who has been blind from birth, but I'll try. Lie back down and close your eyes."

She lay down and did so, and she felt him run a careful hand over her brow as he brushed strands of hair out of her face. His voice grew soft, almost somnolent as he started to talk.

"When I'm a man, I'm a tall man, and broad. I'm aware of the space I feel and the air I displace. Imagine what it's like, having people step out of your way because of the authority they don't even know they're granting you. I can feel my heart beating a slow lento in my chest. Beneath my clothes my skin is scarred and tough and marked with ink, and I can feel the stiffness of scar tissue and the ache of old injuries. Think yourself into that space, the power of your muscles pulling beneath your skin, the stubble on your face like sandpaper."

She frowned in concentration, her eyes still closed, and he rubbed at her temples with gentle fingers.

"Relax. Don't force yourself into it; just let your thoughts flow and expand into what I'm describing. Can you feel it?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"Good," he said. "When I walk I walk with purpose and with long, easy strides. My hips are narrow and hard, and I never need to sway to keep ahead. I'm so used to my cock and balls, the soft folds of my foreskin and scrotum that I never really have to think; but they are there, present, influencing how I move and how I sit and how I dress, the belt of my trousers low on my hips. Do you have it?"

She nodded wordlessly, and she heard cloth rustle as he shifted closer to her. The next few words came with a faint surprise as his breath tickled her ear.

"When I'm a woman everything is different. My skin is softer and smoother, like the skin of a peach, and I can feel the weight of my breasts pulling at the muscles on my back, a constant weight and tension that informs and influences every one of my movements. I can feel the hair on the nape of my neck, and it brushes against my shoulders and catches the breeze, displacing the air in a different way. My hips are broader, my femurs more widely spaced, and my arse curves, soft and firm away from the folded cleft of my cunt. I feel vulnerable beneath my clothing, my nylon and silk and elastic, and the heels of my shoes force me to walk with a sway, the tops of my thighs brushing together, marking the absence of my cock with each step. I feel more vulnerable, and people sometimes don't give me the space they would if I were a man, but there is also a kind of potency and power in the strength of my legs and thighs, and the shift in my balance from my broad hips and my lower center of gravity. That's what it's like, or a shadow of what it's like."

Ariadne opened her eyes and sat up then, keenly aware of the boundaries of her body and the wetness between her thighs, under her jeans, and she could feel her face flushing as her heart beat faster in the cage of her ribs. "Have you – have you ever – "

"Fucked someone as a woman?"

"I don't want to pry too much," she said, a little embarrassed, "but – "

"But you want to know," he said, rocking back on his knees, a wicked smile spreading across his face.

"Pretty much, yeah," she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.

"Hmm." He stood up and brushed at the seat of his trousers before he walked away in the direction of her kitchenette, and she wasn't sure if she had seen the last traces of a hard-on under his clothing. "Let's save that answer for another lecture, shall we?" he said as he filled her kettle and put it on. "Right now, I want a cup of tea."


	3. Chapter 3

Ariadne once read about the phenomenon of Normalization of Deviance somewhere. In the example she had read, you could park a tank by an office building, and by the end of the week nobody would notice it any more than the other cars parked there. Familiarity and habit did many things to one's sense of perception, and given enough time even the strangest things became routine. She felt as though a similar sort of sea change had had happened to her after Arthur had showed up at the _École d'architecture_ two weeks ago with an H &K MP5K in hand. Sixteen days ago she hadn't even been able to name the gun.

In the past sixteen days she had clocked in thirty hours of range time via Arthur's dream training program and he had started to shift the emphasis of his instruction from target shooting to actual drills. He put her through fifteen-minute long dry-fire exercises designed to improve her draw speed and initial accuracy, and she could now draw the Beretta from a holster and fire an accurate double-tap without hesitation. It did bother her a little that she was no longer bothered by the wounds ballistics explanations he gave her when he had taught her the Mozambique drill, although she was still taking longer to line up the third shot than he had liked.

She lay on her back in her narrow little bed, listening to Arthur's breathing as he slept on the floor of her apartment, and tried to figure out the point in time where she had stopped being Ariadne Mitchell, graduate student, and instead become the person she was now. The old her had been vaguely suspicious of guns and would probably have lost any kind of fight that involved real bodily harm, but now she lay in bed too wound-up to sleep, her muscles aching and knuckles bruised. Eames and Arthur had started the waking portion of her hand-to-hand training once they felt that she had learned enough to not hurt herself or others, and she had spent an hour after school sparring with the both of them in a gym before they had escorted her back to her apartment.

She remained as she was for a few minutes before she rolled over with a small sound of frustration, too tense to sleep, and, she admitted reluctantly to herself, somewhat pent-up. She had not had any alone time since Arthur had shown up, submachine gun in hand, and the constant presence of two very attractive men in her life was probably not helping.

"Can't sleep?" Arthur asked, his voice soft and a little fuzzy. She rolled over to face his side of the room and saw him sitting up in his sleeping bag.

"Did I wake you up?" she asked.

"No, I've been trying to get to sleep but just couldn't. Cobb has trouble sleeping. Mal had trouble sleeping. I think it's an occupational hazard," he said, with a low, rueful laugh. "I haven't yet met a man with a briefcase full of soap, so I should still be fine."

She couldn't help but smile at the reference as she swung her feet out of bed and turned the lights on.

* * *

In the end she put the kettle on and made cups of chamomile tea in the vain hope that it would help them both get to sleep. They sat at her tiny dinette table, sipping their tea in silence while she ate the last of her shortbread fingers.

"You said you had something to show me tomorrow." _Today_ , she thought, belatedly. It was an hour past midnight.

"We were thinking of introducing you to a contact of ours here in Paris, but he'd been busy until recently."

"What does he do?" she asked, dusting the shortbread crumbs off her fingers.

"Officially, he's a sculptor. Works in bronze, sometimes clay. Unofficially – well, you'll find out when you meet him."

* * *

They finished their tea and Arthur helped her carry the cups to the sink, where she left them for tomorrow. She was about to climb into bed and turn out the light when he stopped her and brushed a callused fingertip against the corner of her mouth, his touch awkward as though he were unsure of himself.

"There's a crumb on your face," he said softly, and she was suddenly aware of her own frustration, of the scent of him overlaid with the faintest hint of frankincense and how hard and masculine he had felt against her in their sparring matches. She hesitated for a moment, and an unfamiliar look flickered over his face as he stepped away from her and towards the bookshelf in her apartment.

"What are you doing?" she asked as she sat down on the side of her bed and watched him.

"Looking for something to read," he said, running his fingertips lightly over the spines of her books.

"So you can get to sleep?" He had finished reading his Michael Chabon novel two days ago and he had not brought a new book with him today.

"Maybe," he said with a slight smile as he pulled one of her paperbacks from the shelf. "I thought maybe I could read to you."

"A bedtime story? Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Ariadne could not imagine Arthur coping well around children. Kids were loud, messy and bad for the expensive suits he liked to wear from time to time.

"I've told a few bedtime stories before," he said, his smile growing just a bit wider as he sat down beside her bed, his back resting against the frame. A gentle breeze stirred the curtains and ruffled his hair, making it hang over his eyes, and he pushed it back with an impatient hand.

"Cobb's kids?" she asked, climbing back into bed.

"Yeah. I'm Philippa's godfather." He flipped the paperback novel open and smiled at the inscription on the autographed flyleaf, and then turned the pages until he got to the start of the story.

"Was that Cobb's idea?" she asked, rolling over to face the window.

"Mallorie's, actually," he said, shifting his weight a little as though his hip was hurting him. He cleared his throat then, and then started to read aloud from the page. " _'Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough, that his biggest problem was killing time.'_ "

Ariadne shut her eyes then and let her mind wander to the sound of Arthur's voice, still frustrated but suddenly very drowsy. It took her a while, but she drifted into a gray, fragmented sleep somewhere around the point where he had been narrating Shadow's fight with Mad Sweeney, forty-three pages later.

* * *

Ariadne wasn't sure what time Eames had arrived at her apartment to pick her and Arthur up, or how long they had let her sleep after his arrival. She dimly registered him murmuring to her before he shook her gently by the shoulder. "Wake up, love," he said.

She rolled over in bed and squinted at him. "Good morning?" she asked, vaguely disoriented and doubtful about the time.

"It's still morning, yes," he said, taking her hand and levering her upright after she had propped herself up on an elbow.

"It's nearly eleven?" she asked after a quick glance at her alarm clock. Last night's sparring session had left her stiff and aching in places that she wasn't sure she had known she _had._ "Where's Arthur?"

"Downstairs, smoking one of my Dunhills," Eames had said with a wicked smile.

"There's probably a place in the special hell for you," she croaked, thinking of Arthur's attempts to quit smoking.

"Oh, definitely, but I do intend to _earn_ it," he said with typical flair, and she shook her head in futile disapproval as she grabbed some fresh clothes and staggered into her bathroom for a hot shower.

* * *

The water was hot and soothing and she turned on the tap until she stood beneath her own private deluge, leaning against the tiled wall of her shower stall as the heat worked the stiffness out of her neck and shoulders. She was also, at this point, so wound-up that she could no longer care that she wasn't exactly alone, even if Eames and Arthur had never been rude enough to interrupt her mid-shower. She reached down and started to touch herself, her movements slow at first and then fast and ragged as she got closer to relief, her gasps lost in the roar and splash of water falling around her.

* * *

Ariadne came out of the shower dressed and feeling human again, and she ran a brush through her wet hair while Eames and Arthur sat at her dinette table. There was something about their body language that made her wonder if they had heard her in the shower. She glanced up at her mirror and found her face slightly flushed, but it could have been the hot water, she told herself, and continued brushing her hair. Arthur was the first to speak after a minute of uncomfortable silence.

"I think we need to talk," he said as he put down her copy of _American Gods_.

Ariadne grabbed the third chair, the one that Arthur had brought upstairs so they all could sit at the table. "About," she said, hating the furious heat in her own face. It was not a question, because she had already guessed what they were going to talk about.

"I agree," Eames said from behind one of her trade paperbacks, and Arthur kicked him once, under the table when he didn't put it down. His expression, when he finally put the comic book down, was uncharacteristically sober and vaguely embarrassed.

"I guess you two are going to try to be gentlemen now," she said, before she lost the nerve to speak, "and you're going to tell me that I shouldn't want to fuck you both because you're scoundrels and criminals and a nice girl like me shouldn't get involved with men like you. Well, I'm _twenty-five_ and I think I would know what I want and don't want. The last two weeks have been hell on my psyche and I think it would be natural that I'd actually start having a crush on you two, but I'd like to think I'm sensible enough to know that it's a bad idea." She took a long, shaky breath after she had said that, and looked at the both of them. Arthur looked vaguely guilty, as though she had scored a point, and Eames merely raised an eyebrow at her miniature monologue.

"You're right," Arthur said after a few moments of silence, his gaze downcast, "That was patronizing of me, and I was going to treat you like a child, and I apologize."

"Thanks," she said, before she reached out to pat him briefly on the arm. She had always appreciated his ability to admit his own mistakes and shortcomings.

"And now that you have pre-empted Arthur putting his foot in his mouth," Eames said, "My real reasons for hesitating are less out of fear of despoiling you, Ariadne, and more out of a sense that this situation would not be the best for anything like a healthy relationship."

"Yeah," she said. "It would be kinda like sleeping with my doctor." They both nodded in reply, and Arthur smiled, a little sheepishly, afterwards. It was sometimes difficult to reconcile his competency and lethality with his exterior boyishness and the dimples on his face.

"Which brings me to this," Eames said. "Working off your doctor analogy, anything that happens between us in this context remains in this context, like your medical records. Even if we should continue to associate with each other afterward, nothing leaves this room and our lips. So yes, I heard you rubbing one out in the shower, but no, I am not about to post it to Twitter or any other form of social network."

"And I was worried I was going to have to kill you two to keep my dignity," she said lightly, reassured by Eames' candor.

"I would love to see you try," Arthur said blandly as he pushed his chair back and stood up. "Let's go. We have a lunch date to keep with Yves."

* * *

As it turned out, Yves really _was_ a sculptor and a bronze caster; he ran a small gallery out of a converted laundry in 13e but did the majority of his actual sculpting work outside Paris. He was also, as Arthur explained after they had walked in the gallery door, a part-time arms dealer and information broker.

The front windows were filled with small sculptures; conventional, representative pieces, busts and hunting bronzes for the most part. It looked closed, but the door was unlocked and they went in anyway.

 _"Yves, le salaud,"_ Eames said conversationally in French as the door swung shut behind them, and a short, powerfully-built man stepped out of the back room and gazed out at them with a blend of amusement and indifference.

 _"Meilleur un salaud qu'une pute."_ Yves said affectionately, clapping Eames on the shoulder. He looked older than forty but younger than sixty. His thinning hair had grayed to the color of steel wool and his face was weathered and leathery, lined from time and the sun. "You must be Ariadne, he said in English, glancing from Eames to her, and then to Arthur. "Which would make the both of you Theseus and Dionysus. Or, should I say, Chiang and Wainwright?" His French was distinctly Parisian, but his English accent suggested other origins, or at least, an English teacher who wasn't Francophone.

"Those are the names you're using this time?" Ariadne looked at Arthur, who took his sunglasses off in the half-light of the showroom. "Eames has got to be Wainwright, because you're the one who _could_ plausibly pass as someone named Chiang if the lights were actually on."

"My grandfather could have been half-Chinese," Arthur said dryly, "I'm American, these things happen there." She studied him carefully, unsure if he was joking or not. His bone structure and coloration could be interpreted as evidence of Asian ancestry several generations back, or could have just been a fortunate confluence of genetics. What she knew about the both of them wasn't so much a sketch as much as a void outlined with the negative space of things they _weren't_.

* * *

Yves took them into the back office of the gallery, and then upstairs to a narrow little apartment. The main room was larger than her studio in 16e but not by much. Most of the space was taken up by a scarred wooden table and a refrigerator that looked older than she was. The table had been set for four, and Yves held a chair out for her with an old-fashioned gallantry that felt oddly out-of-place in the company she had been keeping over the past two weeks. Eames and Arthur had always been polite in her presence, but they also seemed to subscribe to a certain egalitarianism, a mindset that had assumed, for the most part, that she could get her own chair and open her own doors.

Lunch was a cold roast chicken and a rustic boar terrine served on rounds of bread, accompanied by salad and a bottle of red wine, and everyone seemed determined not to talk shop during the meal until the cheese course had started and the wine had circulated for a second round.

"The shipment you brought was short a few items," Yves said as he cut himself a sliver of Morbier. Ariadne thought of the context of their lunch meeting and the likely contents of the shipment and realized why Eames and Arthur had driven into France from Poland instead of flying.

"You're going to have to take that up with Tomas and whoever he's using as a chop shop." Arthur said after he had wiped at his mouth with a napkin. "The welding work in the compartments was, to put it politely, _awful_ , and we couldn't fit everything in there." From the look on Arthur's face, "awful" was an abuse of understatement in service of decorum.

"It would have been a little difficult explaining the overflow to border guards even with the bribes we were handing out," Eames said mildly.

Yves rested his chin thoughtfully in his hand before nodding, once. "Very well. I will take it up with Tomas, and we are, as you say it, square."

Arthur nodded then, satisfied, and drained his wineglass.

"If I may say so, however, it is unlike you to actually involve yourselves in the business of revenge. There's no profit in it."

"This isn't about revenge," Arthur said. "This is about cleaning up the mess that someone else made."

"And her?" Yves asked, glancing over at Ariadne. She looked down at her empty plate, unsure of what to say.

"Someone who wound up in the mess through no fault of her own," Eames said as he toyed with the stem of his wineglass.

"How is she with a gun? I'm not selling to anyone who doesn't know what she's doing. It's bad for business."

"Fairly good. She knows the gun safety rules, she knows what not to do, and we're working on her draw-fire and Mozambique drill right now. This in the space of two weeks," Arthur said.

"That is very good for a beginner. Pity the Legion does not take women." Yves saluted her with his wineglass.

"I'm not _that_ good," she protested, "and that's not what I want to do with my life, anyway."

"What do you want to do with your life, then?" Yves asked with gentle curiosity.

"I'm an architect," she said.

"Now that I can respect, at least," Yves said. "My older one, my boy, he decides sculpture is not good enough for him and he goes off to Goldsmiths in the UK and becomes a conceptual artist. All theory, very little practical work. People won't buy something they can't possess." The tone of his voice implied patient forbearance and the faintest hint of a grudge. "Just three days ago I got a catalogue from his last show in London. How do you buy a work that is a goldfish in a television?"

"A live goldfish?" Eames asked Yves, his curiosity piqued. "What does the gallery do if the fish goes belly-up?"

"Flush it and put a fresh one in, I'd assume," Arthur shrugged.

"Goldfish are not archival," Yves said, shaking his head in disapproval.

* * *

After lunch Yves took them down to the back room of the gallery, which was almost as large as the showroom itself. Larger sculptures stood here and there in the room, covered in dusty drop cloths.

"Your hand please, _mademoiselle_ ," he asked after he had turned the lights on. Ariadne glanced over at Arthur, who nodded once. She was still a little uneasy, but she reached out and placed her hand lightly in Yves' rough, callused palm. He took her hand gently and turned it over to look at her palm, and then let go.

"You have small hands," he said, "and a delicate build. Fine wrists. What have you been training her with?" he asked Arthur.

"I started her off with a Beretta 1934, but we moved on to a Hi-Power in 9mm last week." Arthur said as Yves pushed one of the bronzes aside, and it rolled gently on castors, motes of dust swirling in the light. "I think she'll be able to handle .40 when we get there."

"Perhaps," Yves said as he pulled out a footlocker that had been hidden behind the statue. "Maybe she should pick. It would be better if you chose something you can be comfortable with," he told her.

"The Hi-Power is a good choice," Eames said from behind Arthur. "Hardly gucci, but the SAS can't be wrong."

"Gucci?" she asked, as Yves laid several oilcloth-wrapped bundles out on a workbench.

"British military slang," Arthur said. "Don't get him started. And don't listen to him if he tells you to carry it in Condition Zero."

"Which do you think I am, suicidal or stupid?" she asked.

"I would never do that to you," Eames said. "I only tell that to people I don't like."

"Don't listen to him, Ariadne." Yves said as he finished unwrapping the guns.

"Agreed," Arthur said, and Eames could only shake his head. His smile was one of gentle defeat.

* * *

Yves watched while Ariadne picked up each of the guns in turn, weighing them in her hand and testing her grip on each one. The guns before her were an interesting collection, sourced from several different makers. She tried one of the smaller Glocks, a compact Glock 26, but put it back down on the workbench, and then picked up a USP Compact and an Argentine Browning Hi-Power after that. Each time she held each pistol in her hands and weighed it carefully, accounting for the ammunition that she would also have to carry with it, and then put it down.

Second-to-last in the lineup was a small, snub-nosed little pistol, and her fingers curled perfectly around its grip when she picked it up. "Baikal," she said, reading the trademark on the compact pistol she had been holding. It fit her hand comfortably, and she turned it over to look at the other side of the slide.

"A Skyph, chambered for 9x18mm Makarov." Eames said, looking over her shoulder. "Stopping power is about equivalent to .380 ACP. It suits you."

"They're pretty much nonexistent in the US," Arthur said. "There was an executive order quite a while back that makes it impossible to import Russian firearms. If you try bringing this back with you the ATF is probably going to confiscate it and ask you some pointed questions about where you got it."

"It's not like I can bring a gun on a plane anyway," she said, putting the gun back down in its square of oilcloth. She moved on to the last pistol in the row, one that she couldn't identify. The inscription on the slide marked it as a CZ RAMI.

"Try us." Arthur said dryly, with the faintest hint of a smile.

"It's a rarity now even outside the United States," Eames said as he picked the Skyph up, its compact frame making it look almost toy-like in his large hands. "Izhmash discontinued it for lack of demand some years ago, because the improvements it has over the Makarov aren't enough to justify the higher cost of production, and the Russian military is moving towards their own hot-loaded version of 9mm in any event."

* * *

In the end she decided to take the Skyph, reasoning that she could leave it with Eames and Arthur before she left for the US.

"Put it on my tab, Yves," Arthur had said, and they shook hands to seal the agreement.

"May you never have a need to use this, but use it in good health if you have to," he told her as she stowed the unloaded pistol in her purse, a dense little parcel wrapped in its square of oilcloth.

"Thank you," she said. It was strange to feel so natural doing something she would never have done two weeks ago. The sensation was something like the emotional equivalent of probing the place where a missing tooth had been, and she wondered for a while if this was how people like Eames and Arthur got started.

They stepped out of the back room of the gallery into the showroom, and Yves kissed her politely on the cheek before she left. "Be safe, _mademoiselle_. You are in good hands with these two."

* * *

With that she stepped out of the gallery into Paris' Chinatown flanked on either side by Eames and Arthur. They stopped at a small café and bought takeout _bánh mì_ – Vietnamese sandwiches – for a cold dinner later, and then headed back to her apartment. They were halfway up the stairs to her front door when Arthur stopped and pulled his a cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He waved them ahead when she stopped, and answered the call in the stairwell.

"I'd put the Skyph in a safe place until we can get you some ammunition and a holster," Eames said as he shut the door behind him.

"Yeah. Not much good to me unloaded," she said. She left the takeout bag in the refrigerator and then slipped the gun in her dresser drawer, beside her clean t-shirts.

Arthur came in shortly after that, his mouth taut with some kind of tension.

"What's wrong?" she asked him, as she locked the door behind him. He sat down heavily in the folding chair at her dinette table and sagged as though very tired.

"Bad news," Eames said. He poured a glass of cold water from the jug in the fridge and slid it across the table to Arthur.

"Someone tried to make a grab at Philippa some hours ago," Arthur said after he had drained half the glass. "Cobb wanted to call me earlier but he was busy."

Eames handed Ariadne a second glass of cold water, and she sipped at it gratefully before she spoke. "Is everyone okay?"

"Dom's shaken and pissed-off, and Pip's pretty frightened, but everyone is fine, for the most part. He didn't want to give me all the details over an unsecured line." Arthur kneaded at his temples with his fingertips, and then let out a long, weary sigh.

"Do you want to go back to LA to make sure they _will_ be all right?" she asked him, remembering that he was more than just Cobb's colleague. He was also Philippa's godfather, and had probably known the Cobbs for longer than he had let on. She was personally afraid, but much less so than the first time Arthur had warned her about the danger she had been in. The cold glass under her fingertips seemed to ground her and prevent the fear from taking over completely.

"Do I want to? Yes. Is it a good idea? Probably not." Arthur said as he leaned back in his chair. "Now they've failed at their bid Cobb's going to be harder to approach, which means you're an easier target."

"What does this mean now?" she asked, "I mean, for us." _For me_ , she wanted to say, but did not. If anything Eames and Arthur were in more danger than she was.

"It just means we're going to be even more cautious from here on." Arthur frowned a little and shifted his weight in his seat, and then pulled the holster out of his right jeans pocket and laid it gently on the dinette table.

"Trousers getting a little tight there, Arthur?" Eames asked as he put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

"That is none of your business, Eames." Arthur said wearily.

"Well, you could stop eating more than me," Eames said helpfully. "I have no idea where those calories all _go_."

"He doesn't need to eat any _less_ ," Ariadne said. "If he loses any more weight he'll make _me_ look fat."

"You are not fat, pet," Eames said, "You only weigh seven stone. Which would be about a hundred pounds in American."

"I'll have you know," Arthur said after a while, "that when I was in the Air Force my instructors were worried I wouldn't make it through jump training at my current weight so they put me on a weight-gain program. I gained twenty pounds, but lost two inches around my waist. I think I was just born to be skinny."

"Why were they so worried about your weight if you weren't too heavy?" Ariadne frowned, trying to understand the reasoning.

"Oh, so he won't be crushed under the weight of his own kit when he tries to land," Eames said.

"You won't believe the amount of crap they had me carry while still expecting me to be able to jump out of a plane."

" _What_ exactly were you doing for the Air Force that required jump training? Or can't you tell me?"

"I was mostly being an idiot," Arthur sighed. "I tried to game the system when I signed up with ROTC, and I thought my slight eyesight problems would guarantee me a posting as an air traffic controller. Unfortunately the brass took a look at my physical and my scores and volunteered me for the Combat Control Team."

The unit designation was vaguely familiar to her. "Those are pathfinders, right? Special forces types."

"Basically, Ariadne, he's the world's most overqualified air traffic controller."

"That's accurate," Arthur said. "Usually things went like this. The brass would say, _'Okay, we're going to drop you in the middle of Afghanistan and we need you to make an airstrip. Here's your M4A1 and some explosives.'_ And then afterwards they say, _'oh, very good, you have an airstrip, now we want you to sit tight and coordinate air traffic and fire support from your current, very exposed location now that you've blown up all the obstacles you could have used for cover.'_ Might as well have asked me to find a unicorn and an endless roll of hundred-dollar bills while they were at it."

"Are you sure you _can_ talk about that?" Ariadne asked, raising an eyebrow at the matter-of-fact way he described circumstances that sounded, frankly, ridiculous, insane, and extremely dangerous, all at the same time. The gentle humor and lack of bombast somehow made him more intimidating, but she had learned by now that the truly competent rarely had to exaggerate their own abilities; they simply had nothing to compensate for, any more.

"No. I'm fairly sure I'll have to kill you now," Arthur said, deadpan. "Actually that is the stuff I _can_ talk about, which is why this is the only thing I can tell you about the time I was with the Air Force."

"What about you?" she asked Eames, after she had digested Arthur's _précis_ of his background. "Were you career military too?"

"Oh, bloody hell, no," he said. "I was a stage actor before I enlisted. I studied at RADA but dropped out. I was not a particularly good student back then."

That made sense, she thought; it explained the flawless dream-forgery, and the theatrical flair that he was so fond of. "Did you have any big stage roles?" she asked. She didn't think any kind of fame blended well with the shadowy world of extraction.

"Not many. I did bit parts in small productions, mostly regional or fringe groups, under various stage names. I once wanted to audition for Godot in a production of _Waiting for Godot,_ though."

"Did you even _read_ the play before you auditioned?" Arthur asked, unable to tell if Eames had been joking or not.

"Oh, of course I did, so I auditioned for Lucky instead. Had one of my mates drag me into the audition room by a leash with a collar around my neck," he said with a sly grin that seemed aimed more at Arthur than at Ariadne.

She thought of Eames, with his alpha-male attitude and build, on a leash. She didn't think of herself as a particularly kinky person but the visual was rather appealing. "Did you get it?" she asked, returning to the topic before her own imagination sidetracked her too much. Arthur looked down at the Glock 26 he had left on the table and kept his gaze there as he picked lint off the pocket holster; something she noticed him doing from time to time, usually when Eames got overly familiar with him.

"I did, yes, although it probably helped that the director had a bit of a thing for fit young men on leashes. I also auditioned for the role of Alan Strang in a production of _Equus_ ," Eames said thoughtfully, "but that went nowhere because I had to enlist."

"You _had_ to enlist?" she asked.

"I had half the heroin dealers in London angry with me at that point," he said casually, in the way she could imagine him reading a grocery list.

She wondered how Eames had gotten into trouble of that magnitude but wasn't sure asking was a good idea. She looked at Arthur, but he was no help. In the end she sipped at her glass of water and then said, "If – if it's okay to ask, _what did you do?_ "

"Oh, it wasn't my doing, more my brother's, but I doubt they cared at that point which Eames they were going to kill and dump in the Thames."

"Uh. Wow." Further eloquence was not required, at that point.

"After that I was actually only a squaddie for about six months," he went on to say, "and then the Ministry of Defense pulled me from my unit and put me to work on something else. The only thing I can tell you about that something else is that it was how I got involved in dreamshare in the first place."

"Do most extractors have such backgrounds?" she asked, wondering if Cobb and Mal had been military too.

"It's generational, I think," Arthur said, "Most of the very good ones tend to have been military or intelligence before they went freelance, but the technology has been around long enough that the newer ones tend to have rather shady pasts."

"That is why, Ariadne," Eames said, "Double-crossing an extractor and letting him live is generally rather bad for your continued health."

"For example," Arthur said after a few moments of thought, "before I flew to Poland on Yves' errand, I was in Helsinki talking to someone, an extractor by the name of Enckell."

"Christian?" Eames asked, a blend of surprise and regret showing naked in his eyes and mouth and Arthur nodded, once.

"He'd vanished off the face of the earth about three years ago," Arthur continued, "and then resurfaced about eight months later, retired and working in a florists' shop in Helsinki. He got burned by Cobol; the kind of betrayal that leads to permanent, lifelong disability. During the years that he's been delivering bouquets and taking down orders for weddings and Valentine's Days he's been planning payback and doing the legwork for it. I think he could probably have pulled it off if he managed to find a team suicidal enough to go along with him." Left unspoken, she realized, was the implication that Eames and Arthur were going to be part of that team after they were done with guarding her in Paris.

"I told him not to take that job," Eames said, a little sadly. "Bloody fool."

"Did you know him well?" Ariadne asked.

"We were lovers for a while, but things didn't work out," Eames said, his eyes half-lidded and pensive. "It was probably for the best. We were not good for each other."

Ariadne wasn't sure of what to say in reply to that. "I'm sorry," she managed, after an awkward silence.

"Oh, it's all right," he said, his smile bittersweet. "Life happens. It's just that in this profession life happens a lot more than with other people."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> French translation by my husband, who would like me to remind Francophone fic readers that it's been 14 years since he entertained ideas of majoring in French. (He's doing grad-level Econs now.) All remaining mistakes are mine.


	4. Chapter 4

Eames got himself shot on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

* * *

Ariadne curled up on the ageing sofa in Arthur's safe house and hugged her knees, trying to still the shaking that had taken over once the adrenaline had worn off. The weight of the Skyph she was wearing holstered behind her right hip was a slight comfort, but she had not fired a shot at all, not in real life, and she had started to doubt her ability to defend herself or the people she cared about. She wanted to reach for her totem and test it to see if she was in someone else's dream, but she knew too well that this was reality, and more than that, a reality that had become something of a nightmare to her.

* * *

She was alone in the safe house in Montmartre; Arthur had dropped her off and made sure she was fine before leaving to take care of business. He had, with his usual foresight and attention to detail, prepared for the possibility of her moving in with them and had dedicated an upstairs bedroom to her use. He had also prepared a couple spare sets of clothes for her to change into, although she wasn't sure where he had managed to find out all her clothing sizes.

"I know you want me to stay with you, but I have to go and make sure Eames is all right," Arthur had told her after he had dropped her off in the safe house, taking her cold hands in his own. He was always steady and warm, even in a situation like this. "I don't think anybody is going to make an attempt now the police are involved, and you're going to be safe here. Remember what we've taught you."

She had hugged him fiercely then, unwanted tears rolling slowly down the fabric of his green raincoat, and he had wrapped his arms around her and held her until she had stopped sobbing, his heart booming against her cheek like a racehorse's.

"It's okay to be scared," he told her after he had let go, looking into her tear-stained face with his hands on her shoulders. "There's a shotgun on the left side of the bed in my room upstairs. You should know how to handle one by now, and you can take it with you to your room if it'll make you feel better."

"Okay," she had said after a long, ragged breath, "Go do what you have to."

"Be back in a bit. You know my number. Call me if you need me," he said, before he stepped out the door of the safe house and into a Paris that now felt like a warzone to her. She told herself he would be okay. He had three guns concealed on his person and, as he had said, nobody would dare to try anything now that the first attempt had been bungled so badly.

She went upstairs for the shotgun anyway.

* * *

She had wandered through the upstairs floor of the safe house in an attempt to burn off the febrile restlessness in her veins, too nervous and keyed-up to sit still. The doors to Eames' and Arthur's rooms were unlocked, and she had gone into them and looked around, not so much out of morbid curiosity as much as a desperate need for something to do while she had paced.

She knew Arthur's room the moment she opened the door and stepped into it; the faintest ghost of his cologne had remained behind in his absence, the notes of frankincense and cedar she had become accustomed to. A stray cufflink lay on the dresser table beside a squat glass cologne bottle and a half-used strip of over-the-counter decongestant. She looked beneath the perfectly made bed and found a shotgun resting in a rack screwed into the bed frame, on the far side of the room from the door. The pair of horn-rimmed glasses and the well-thumbed Gabriel García Márquez novel on the left-side nightstand, as well as the pencil stub and Moleskine notebook made clear the side of the bed Arthur preferred to sleep on.

She crouched down beside the bed and reached for the shotgun. As she drew it out into the light she saw that it was a Benelli M4, specifically the law enforcement-only model with the 14-inch barrel and a collapsible buttstock. A shell holder had been bolted to the side, and a closer look told her that half the shells were solid slugs. She had no idea how Arthur had acquired a combat shotgun or how he had managed to smuggle it into France, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know the specifics. Her fingers were outlined in condensation on the cold steel and she knelt by it for a while before she let go and stood back up. Her hands were still shaking badly enough that she didn't trust herself with the shotgun, even though she knew that Arthur, like any other sensible gun owner, had left the safety on.

She wasn't entirely sure what she would find in Eames' room. Something other than Arthur's perfectly-made bed, she thought, and the copy of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ on the nightstand. She hesitated in the hall outside, her fingers clammy on the doorknob, before she pushed the door open and stepped into the room.  
The space smelled like Eames the way Arthur's room had smelled of his; fresh, sharp, underscored with the faintest floral note; and she realized from the wetness on her face that she was weeping, again. Eames and Arthur were such complements, such bookends, that she had expected Eames' room to be messy and chaotic in contrast to Arthur's own austerity. What she had found instead was a room that wasn't so much messy as much as just cluttered, but lived-in and organic.

Books, folded clothing and other personal items filled most of the horizontal surfaces as though he had started to unpack his life before he had realized that he hadn't quite had the room for all his stuff. The closet doors hung open to reveal the cheerful eccentricity of his wardrobe and a pair of expensive loafers lay by the bed as though he had kicked them off at the end of a long day and not bothered to put them away the morning after.

The left side of his unmade bed was full of books, small paperback editions, plays and fantasy novels and procedural mysteries. From her brief survey it seemed that Eames was a voracious, eclectic reader in his own time. What broke her then was the spare pillow wadded up beside the books, compressed as though he had slept snuggled up to it most of the time. She could not bear to be in his room any longer after that, and had retreated downstairs to the living room and the lumpy sofa, shaking and sobbing spasmodically.

* * *

She wasn't entirely sure how long she had sat there in her defensive curl when her cell phone had pinged in her pocket. She drew it out with cold, nerveless hands and saw that Arthur had sent her a text message. The timestamp told her that it had been hours since Arthur had left, but her sense of time had deserted her entirely since the shooting had started. The message had said: _eames is ok. otw back._ The message prompted more tears again, this time from relief rather than dread.

* * *

Arthur sent her a second text message five minutes before she heard the scrape of footfalls outside and the bolt turning in the door: _back. coming in. just so you know._

Eames was first to come in the door, his face pale and eyes bright with pain. He held up his hands as she got up from the sofa and ran up to hug him. "Not now," he hissed, softly, and she stopped short before she hurt him. The bullet holes in his shirt reminded her of the shots he had taken, and she frowned quizzically when she realized that there were no bloodstains on his clothing. "Class IIIA body armor, love," he said, his smile a pained shadow of its former self, and she had wavered between kicking him in the shin and punching him in the arm. In the end she turned away from him as relief won out over her rage.

Arthur brought up the rear, carrying the MP5K in its briefcase in one hand and a paper shopping bag in the other, and he shut and locked the door behind him as Eames staggered over to the sofa and lay down with a grateful sigh.

"Are you okay?" she asked, and he nodded listlessly without opening his eyes.

"Don't mind him," Arthur said after he had hung his raincoat up on the coat rack. "He's on some pretty strong painkillers right now."

"I'd whinge about the cracked ribs," Eames said weakly from the sofa, "but I don't know if I have the motivation to."

"I thought they'd killed you," she whispered, perching herself awkwardly on the edge of the sofa by his leg so as not to nudge his sore ribs. "No more heroics, okay?"

"S'my job, Ariadne," he had murmured just before he nodded off.

Arthur looked down at Eames and shook his head. "I should have known he'd pass out the moment he got in the door. I'll never get him upstairs at this rate," he said.

"Are you going to leave him here?"

"Moving him is only going to hurt him, and I think we've all had enough misery for today. I'll go upstairs and get a blanket to throw over him so he doesn't catch pneumonia. The coughing would be a living hell with the bruising he's got."

"I'll go," she said, and he had let her.

* * *

She had stacked Eames' books on the floor and dragged the sheets and blankets off his bed, and come downstairs with the armload of linens to find Arthur kneeling by the sofa, trying to ease Eames' muddy boots off his feet without waking him.

"Not gonna happen," he said quietly, before he got up and helped her tuck the sheets and blanket around Eames' reclining form. "Your hands are like ice," he said, frowning at her after they had finished. "Have you eaten anything since I left?"

"No," she said, only realizing then that she was shivering. She felt no hunger, however, only a vague hollow weakness.

"You probably should," he said, as he ushered her gently towards the kitchen. She wanted to protest but did not. A tiny voice of common sense in her head told her that Arthur was right, and she probably should have eaten, but all that she had left now the adrenaline and worry had drained away was an emptiness; an inability to feel or comprehend any more after the events of the day.

"You shouldn't feel bad about this," he told her after she had claimed one of the chairs near the kitchen table. "The first time I got shot at, and I mean, in real life, outside of training, similar things happened. I had the shakes afterwards, forgot to eat until I was reminded to. It's a normal stress response to an abnormal situation." She watched him melt a pat of butter in a frying pan and then crack a half-dozen eggs into a bowl and scramble them with a fork.

"I was worried that I didn't have what it took to defend myself," she said.

"Definitely not." A splash of milk went into the bowl of scrambled eggs, and then a dash of pepper. He reached into the refrigerator for a packet of smoked salmon, and shredded the fish into the bowl with careful, dexterous hands. "I went through more than fifteen months of training before I was actually sent out into actual combat," he said, "and I still got the shakes. You deal with it better over time."

"I'm not sure I want to get to the point where I don't get the shakes any more," she pointed out, and he nodded and poured the contents of the bowl in the frying pan and then turned the flame to low.

"Hopefully you won't ever have to," he said. He filled the kettle from the tap and put it on for a pot of tea and put some bread in the toaster.

"Did Eames tell you what happened after you got me out of there?" she asked, listening to the hiss of the kettle and the scrambled eggs sizzling softly in the frying pan.

"Yeah. Drawing the firefight into a crowded area pretty much stopped the shooting. The men sent to kidnap you were thugs, but they weren't so unprofessional that they'd shoot into a crowd full of civilians. Then the police showed up."

"Did they arrest him?" she asked. She could feel the tension bleeding out of her body from the comforting smell of scrambled eggs cooking and the sound of water boiling. She suspected that this was what Arthur had had in mind when he had shooed her into the kitchen and started cooking.

"They arrested everyone involved and took Eames in for questioning because of the concealed carry, but his executive protection credentials checked out. It wasn't like they could charge him with anything anyway. We hadn't even _drawn,_ let alone fired a single shot." Arthur stirred the eggs in the pan as they curdled, and then put his wooden spoon down and reached into one of the cabinets for some plates.

"Weren't they curious about why people were out there trying to kidnap me?"

"Of course they were, but he gave them the standard form answer and pleaded confidentiality on everything until Saito's very high-powered attorneys made a few phone calls and had him released without charges. After that I took him to a clinic for a checkup, and then we came back here."

"Will he be okay?"

"Pretty much. Class IIIA body armor's proof against most small arms fire. His chest looks like a Picasso palette, though," Arthur said as he started a pot of tea steeping and then turned the stove off while the scrambled eggs continued to set.

"His Blue Period." Ariadne said after a moment of thought. "Arthur, that's _horrible._ "

"Sorry. My art history degree is showing again," he said with a wry smile, and she could not help smiling too, despite herself. The humor, dark as it was, made her feel a little better – probably because she _could_ afford to feel better with Eames snoring gently in the living room.

* * *

The toast and scrambled eggs made her feel better and the tea even more so, especially since Arthur had made it very sweet and spiked it with a large tot of rum. "Alcohol's a muscle relaxant," he had said, "and a depressant, which is exactly what you need right now."

The rum in the tea helped the worst of the anxiety bleed off, but it also left her feeling exhausted and wobbly, and she leaned back wearily in her chair and watched Arthur scrape the plates and rinse the dishes in the sink. "Has anyone ever told you that you'd make a good husband?" she had asked, before she had realized what exactly she was saying.

"Actually, no," he said after a moment of thought, the tips of his ears coloring slightly. "You would be the first."

Her face burned as she realized the import of her words. "I didn't mean to, uh, imply you'd make a good husband for _me._ I just meant in general."

"I know what you mean," he said gently. "You should probably go to bed soon. Getting shot at is exhausting."

"Thanks for everything," she said as she got up from her chair. The room tilted a little around her, but she managed to keep her equilibrium.

"It's what I do. Go to sleep, Miss Mitchell," he said, wiping his hands on the dishcloth.

* * *

 _This time her dreams were choppy and disjointed, bleached-out like the landscape coming into sudden relief after a lightning strike. The events of the afternoon played again and again on the dome of her skull. She had been walking home from the Metro station with Eames at her side, while Arthur had tailed them both at a discreet distance, as he had done in the week since Cobb had called from LA with the news that someone had tried to kidnap Philippa._

 _"Don't look," Eames had whispered to her urgently, "but we have a tail." He had leaned in to her as though to whisper an endearment, and she had been trained enough that she had resisted the urge to look back. She took his hand instinctively, and on cue he started to lead her towards a busy street as a pair of gunshots shattered the air around her._

 _"Keep moving," he had urged her as she dropped her umbrella and ducked ahead of him. There was a third pop and she watched him stagger and put his hand to his side as he pushed her around a corner, out of line-of-sight. Somewhere behind them a woman had started to scream, and the crowd was now surging around her as she caught her first glimpse of the shooter, a big man, heavy set, in an ill-fitting suit. She realized now what Eames and Arthur were trying to do; they were going to force their opponents to disengage by surrounding themselves with civilians._

 _Arthur caught up to her halfway down the street and he had grabbed her wrist hard enough to bruise as he pulled her away from the scene._

 _"I need to get you out of here now, before the police show up," he had said. "Eames is going to run interference for us."_

 _"I think they hit him," she had cried, her voice almost inaudible in the commotion._

 _"He'll be okay. Keep moving with me," Arthur had hissed, tense and impatient, and she had looked over her shoulder as Arthur dragged her away. Eames stood out in the crowd, moving opposite most of the panicking pedestrians. There was another pop, and she spotted another shooter – a man in a windbreaker with what looked like a Makarov in his hand._

 _This time, however, dark spots started to blossom on Eames' shirt, and he stumbled again, and then dropped to his knees, and she started to scream –_

* * *

"Hey. It's okay. It's okay. You're awake now." Arthur was saying over a keening noise that she realized dumbly was her own whimpering. He was holding her by the right shoulder, shaking her gently until she came out of the nightmare. He had been holding his Glock 17 in his right hand and put it down on her nightstand, beside her Skyph. "You were having a bad dream."

She had woken him up; she thought with a vague sense of guilt. "I'm sorry," she said, and he shook his head, the fine wisps of his hair drifting around his face with the movement. The dim light from the bedside lamp exaggerated the scale of Arthur's shadow, stretched pale against the wall and its yellowing wallpaper.

"Don't be. I sometimes get nightmares like these too," he said, patting her gently on the shoulder as she scrubbed the tears away from her face. She didn't like them seeing her break down like this, even though the thought of someone as professional as Arthur having similar dreams made her feel a little less helpless.

There was a creak and a shuffle from the hallway, and Eames came into the room with his USP Compact in his hand. He must have gotten up from the couch while she had been sleeping; he had changed out of the clothes he had been wearing when he had fallen asleep and was now shuffling around in a pair of boxers. He had put a shirt on for decency's sake but had not buttoned it up, and his chest, as Arthur had implied earlier in the evening, was a nightmare of fist-sized bruises, almost-black in some places, fading to purple and red at the edges. His hair stuck up from his scalp at awkward angles from the way he had slept earlier, with his head on the armrest of the sofa.

"She was just having a bad dream," Arthur said as he got up stiffly from his crouch and collected his sidearm from the nightstand

"I thought so," Eames said from the doorway of her room, "but I wanted to make sure anyway."

"What time is it?" she asked.

"About three in the morning. You passed out around eight, if it helps," Arthur said, fighting a yawn as he did so. "I'm going back to bed now. Will you be okay?"

"Go to sleep, Arthur. I'll sit up with her if she needs it," Eames said. "I'm in too much pain to sleep right now."

"Put on some pants, Mr. Eames," Arthur had said as he walked past Eames on the way back to his own room.

"I _am_ wearing pants," Eames said, the false indignation in his face and voice reassuring.

"Trousers, then," came Arthur's weary voice, from the hallway, before the door to his room clicked shut.

"If you'll excuse me, then." Eames said to her as he backed out of her room, and she lay back down and waited for him to return.

* * *

Eames came back shortly after, as promised. He had pulled a pair of khakis on and was holding one of his dog-eared paperbacks in his hand. His shirt was still open, the cuffs undone, and the lines of his tattoos were lost in the livid bruising on his skin.

"Are you going to read to me?" she asked, thinking of Arthur and his reading of _American Gods._

"I could if you wanted me to," he said as he sat down in the chair beside her bed, "but aren't you a little old for bedtime stories?"

"Arthur doesn't think so," she said with a faint smile when she realized he was reading a copy of _Wuthering Heights._ It suited him, she thought.

"Well, I'm not him," he said with a slight wince, shifting until he was comfortable, or at least not actively in pain.

"No, you're not," she said, rolling over to face him. "Three weeks ago you told me you didn't like to care about somebody, but you took several bullets for me."

"I was wearing ballistic armor and you weren't. It's a reality of executive protection work," he said, but a strange expression passed fleetingly over his face as he said so.

"Have you done anything like this before?" she asked.

"Not exactly," he said as he flipped through the book, trying to find the page where he had last stopped at. "Arthur's the real expert at executive protection here. My own responsibilities often involve _circumventing_ such protection, however, which means I have to know how it's done."

She shifted in bed, trying to get comfortable, but her legs felt restless and twitchy, and she kicked her feet free of the sheets and blanket before settling down again. The house was silent again except for the sound of her breathing and the dry rustle of pages turning as Eames read his way through _Wuthering Heights._

"Who do you like the most in the book?" she asked, tired but unable to sleep.

"In _Wuthering Heights_?" he asked, marking his page with the glossy black feather that he had used as a bookmark.

"Yeah. I wanted to like it when I first read it, but I think I liked _Jane Eyre_ more."

"This is going to sound awfully stereotypical of me," he said after a few moments of rumination, "but I identify rather strongly with Heathcliff."

"You see yourself as a Byronic hero, huh."

"I suppose you could say it that way, or perhaps I just think that I'm a vindictive, self-centered little shite whose only real redeeming feature is the ability to love."

 _"Eames,"_ she said, "You can't seriously think that about yourself." Eames was, perhaps, a little vindictive and one of the best liars she had ever known, she thought, but he definitely was not entirely self-centered. Not from everything she had seen from three weeks of living with him.

"Not now, no, but I used to," he said with a flippant smile, its effect somewhat reduced by the tension and pain showing around his eyes.

"Is that why you read it? To remind yourself of how far you've come?"

"Not exactly. I read it to remind myself of where I _came from,_ " he said, his expression thoughtful and tinged, she thought, with regret. It was in moments like this when his mood darkened, that he looked most like the protagonist of a Gothic romance. Her imagination painted him up in a greatcoat and breeches, his hair longer and tangled in the wind, and she could not say that he looked out of place in that tableau.

"I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like you've been kind of depressed the past week. Is this about your ex?" she asked, propping herself up on an elbow, and then sitting up in bed. "Arthur said he'd met him in Helsinki."

"Perhaps, yes. I hadn't thought of him in a while. You don't really want to think of someone that much after the kind of breakup that involves prodigious amounts of cocaine and some small arms fire." Eames had the talent of making _anything_ sound like an abuse of understatement. It was the accent, Ariadne thought.

"What was he like? Besides the coke and guns, I mean." Somehow his description of the breakup did not surprise or shock her; she wondered if that meant she had become jaded from all that had happened since she had found out about the threats to her life.

"Christian?" Surprise flickered in Eames' eyes, and he shifted in his chair, silent and thoughtful before he spoke again. "He was beautiful. Cocky but brittle. Underneath the drugs and the daring was, I think, a desperate need to be _needed,_ to be important to somebody, _anybody._ We were so very bad for each other." His voice was soft, the pace of his speech weighted with memory and regret.

"How bad?" she asked, not seriously expecting an answer from Eames.

"Oh, the usual cycle of enabling and codependence that happens when you have two bloody idiots trying to make up for their own broken hearts in all the wrong ways," he said after a few moments of silence. "Matching tattoos, shared drug habits, wild sex in inappropriate places. We even tried an inception job together, but the suggestion didn't take. And now I must ask you, my dear, why are you asking me all this?"

"I've noticed the way you look at Arthur sometimes." _And at me,_ she did not say. The close brush with mortality must have made her more daring, but not by much more.

"And I've noticed the way you two look at each other," Eames said, gently but playfully. "Back during the Fischer job, it was you he kissed, not _me."_

"He did it for distraction," she said without specifying _whom_ exactly Arthur had wanted distracted, thinking of the startling heat and softness of his mouth. "You're not jealous, are you?"

"No, not really. A little envious, perhaps, but I think I would have to think I stood a chance with Arthur to actually be jealous at all."

"You don't think he likes men? I've noticed that he has trouble concentrating on whatever he's doing when you flirt at him," she said, smiling a little at the recollection.

"Oh, it isn't that," he said with a slight shake of his head. "He has made it very clear that he does not sleep with co-workers, and I will respect his boundaries."

"Wouldn't I count as a co-worker too, at this point?"

"I suppose we're going to have to ask him to be sure," Eames said dryly, "but I suspect that he views us both somewhat differently. I am a professional in the extraction scene, and someone he will likely run into repeatedly in the future. You, on the other hand, have no plans to continue in this dubiously-legal field of ours, which makes you safe for pursuit."

She had not thought of it that way. "I thought he was being nice to me because he thought I was a child. You know, indulging me."

"Arthur does not _indulge_ people. He is patient with them to a point, but if he had thought you were childish he would not have let Cobb choose you as our architect for the Fischer job."

She had wanted to reply to that, but instead she yawned widely enough that tears squeezed out of her eyes.

"Go back to sleep, Ariadne," Eames said after that, picking his book back up. "I'll be here."

She lay back down and rolled over in bed, turning away from him, and as she drifted closer to sleep she realized the entire point of the conversation; he had been talking her down from the panic of her nightmare, and she could not help but feel comforted by his presence at her side. She fell asleep to the soft rustle of turning pages, the soft creak of Eames' chair and the clearing of his throat as he continued to read his copy of _Wuthering Heights._


	5. Chapter 5

It was obvious that Eames was in no shape to do any executive protection work. His cracked ribs bothered him a great deal, and the painkillers had dulled his alertness enough that he didn't think he was capable of escorting Ariadne around Paris while she went on with her life. That meant that Arthur would have his hands full; he had not expected further attempts on Ariadne's life, but he refused to assume that she was safe until she had left Paris.

"Won't someone try to kidnap me in the US, like they did with Philippa?" she had asked Arthur Thursday morning as he stood at the stove in the safe house, stirring a pot of homemade chicken stock that had been in the process of being turned into chicken soup. It probably wasn't going to be as good as her dad's chicken soup, but then little else was.

"They could, yes," he said. He scooped up a little broth in his ladle and blew on it until it was cool enough to taste, and then frowned a little as he sipped it. He added a little black pepper to the pot, stirred the broth again and then put the lid back on the pot cock-eyed so the steam could escape. "However, once you're out of Europe Eames and I are going to head over to Helsinki, and then to St. Petersburg, and we're going to create enough trouble that you and Cobb will be the least of their worries." He had not said who "they" were, and she was frankly, getting a little tired of his attempts to protect her from what he knew. The way she saw it, she was neck-deep in trouble already, and attempting to shield her like that just left her feeling more helpless.

* * *

After a little discussion she decided to move temporarily into the safe house that Arthur had set up in Montmartre. It was roomier, closer to school, and the move allowed Arthur to keep an eye on Eames and guard her at the same time. He accompanied her back to her apartment to allow her to pack several changes of clothes, her laptop and a few books. She checked her email before she left with her suitcase, and that was when she found the bombshell in her inbox in between spam mail and notifications from social networking websites.

"Arthur," she said after she had read the email, "My mother says she's coming to Paris."

"That's nice, I guess," he had said halfheartedly as he glanced out between the curtains. He had been worried that they had been followed, and his threat awareness routines were occupying enough of his attention span that he had failed to understand the ramifications of her statement.

"Arthur. You don't understand. My mother is coming to Paris for an academic conference and she says she has enough time to visit me. How do I explain this?" she asked, waving at the suitcase she had packed, her backpack full of books and toiletries, the gun she had worn holstered behind her right hip, all of it shorthand for how her life had gone off the rails since Arthur had shown up in Paris over a month ago.

He stepped away from the window and let the curtains fall shut. "Simple answer: We don't," he said, and then cleared his throat. "Your thesis defense is in, what, a week?"

"A week, but she'll be busy and can't attend. She wants to meet me a couple days before, and then maybe fly back to the US with me after she's done with the conference. I can't bring either of you along to a dinner date with her – she'll ask me all kinds of questions about my personal life that should never be asked in public."

"She can't be that bad," Arthur said skeptically.

"This is my mother we're talking about," Ariadne said, "When my sister came out of the closet all she did was dig up a few back issues of _On Our Backs_ and hand them to her like she'd put them away for the occasion."

 _"On Our Backs?"_ he asked, confused.

"Lesbian periodical," she explained.

"That doesn't sound too bad."

"Cassandra came out to her during dinner at an Olive Garden. Mom just happened to have lesbian magazines in her purse during dinner at a chain restaurant," Ariadne said, blushing furiously at the memory.

"So, uh, just so I get this right, the background checks I performed on you for the Fischer job gave me the distinct impression that your parents were the stereotypical heterosexual middle-aged couple," Arthur said carefully.

"They are, at least, as far as I know," and she did not want to know any more than that, "but they're both overeducated liberals with PhDs, and it means that I can't take them anywhere because they start talking about the Sun King's gangrene in the middle of a pleasant dinner or how the Popes had the penises hacked off of priceless statues so they could put fig leaves on in the middle of a Meijer's."

"The Sun King's gangrene. That sounds a lot like an art history professor I once had at Duke," Arthur said, a little thoughtfully, his lips pursed.

"Duke University? Was that where you went to school?" She felt as though she had grasped another piece of the puzzle that was Arthur's past and identity; one of the many pieces that she had discovered one by one in the time he had spent with her.

"Yeah."

"Well, neither Mom nor Dad has taught there, so I guess we're safe," she said, crossing her fingers as she did. In hindsight she realized that her mother had, as usual, defied her usual expectations.

* * *

Arthur had flatly refused to let her go out with her mother alone.

"Even if you can defend yourself now," he had said as he dished out bowls of chicken soup, "God knows what would happen if another attempt were made while you two were wandering Paris together. I trust you, but I'm not sure if your mother would be okay."

"What am I going to do, then?" she asked him, glancing over at Eames for some help, "Have you show up and say 'Hey, mom, I've been helping professional dream-thieves heist someone's mind and now people are after my life, and this is my bodyguard, Arthur?'"

"No," Arthur said, as he put one of the bowls in front of Eames, and the other beside her. "You tell her you have a date, and you'd love to introduce him to her."

She frowned at him for a bit, and then at Eames. "You're both a little old for this, you realize?" she said, stirring at her soup while she thought.

"Arthur could look your age if he dressed more casually," Eames said, his voice faintly hoarse. He had complained all morning about the painkillers giving him a bad case of dry mouth. He broke a slice of baguette in half and dipped one of the pieces in his chicken soup.

She looked at Arthur and squinted a little. "Yeah. I guess you could look my age if you dressed more like a college student and didn't keep putting all that stuff in your hair."

"I am dressed like a college student," he said, gesturing at the boots, the jeans and the open-collared shirt that he had been wearing.

"No college student looks like he uses a ruler to line his sleeves up when he rolls them up," Ariadne said, a third of her way through her bowl of soup. It wasn't nearly as good as her dad's rainy-day recipe, but it wasn't too bad.

Arthur ladled himself a bowl of soup and then sat down at the table between them. "I'll have you know that I dressed like this when I was in university. At least, when I wasn't in uniform."

"I seriously doubt that you were ever the typical university student, Arthur," Eames said as he put his spoon down and tore off another hunk of bread.

"Yeah, you were probably preppy as all hell," Ariadne said with a slight smile.

"He even plays polo," Eames said, "Number Four defense, weren't you?"

"You play polo?" Ariadne asked. She was fairly sure the typical college student wasn't even sure of the rules of the game. She wasn't.

"Well, I played polo," Arthur said, looking a little uncomfortable, "but I wasn't ever very good at it."

"Yeah. You're completely and totally preppy," she said with finality. "I guess Mom is going to be happy I'm dating someone who looks like New England old money."

"He – " Eames had started to say, but Arthur had kicked him under the table, hard, and he renewed his interest in the contents of his soup bowl.

* * *

Ariadne had known Arthur well enough to know that he never did anything halfway, and she probably shouldn't have been surprised when she found working on his laptop in the kitchen, trawling databases while he performed background checks on her parents.

"What the hell are you doing?" she had asked, a little defensive on their behalf. "If you're going to be my boyfriend of two months, why don't you just ask me for the information you need to know?"

"Because," he had explained, the monitor glow reflecting off his glasses, "I can't expect you to compress into less than a week all the little details that a young couple in love would share with each other over two months of spooning."

That made sense but it felt different when she was the subject of his research, she thought. "How much do you know?"

"Oh, enough. For example, I can see that your education here in Paris isn't exactly hurting their finances that much, and I also have a decent idea of where you were conceived."

She blinked. "How the hell did you know that, or do I not want to know?"

"It wasn't anything too invasive," he said, completely straight-faced, "I just cross-referenced the date of birth on your birth certificate and counted backwards. Hospital records said you were a week early, so that means –"

She cut him off with a quick gesture. "Dear God, enough, Arthur. I was hatched from a cabbage, okay? The stork brought me. I do not want to know when exactly my parents had to have had sex for me to exist right now. In fact, I don't want to think of my parents having sex at all," she had said, and she heard him chuckling gently as she retreated red-faced from the kitchen. It was a nice laugh, and she wondered why he didn't laugh or smile more often.

* * *

Ariadne was fielding a pre-prandial phone call from her mother four days later when someone came downstairs into the living room. She had stared for a moment, trying to place the stranger she saw before she realized belatedly that it was Arthur.

"Hey, uh, mom?" she had said into her cell phone, "Arthur's here to pick me up. I'll see you at the restaurant, okay?"

"I'm looking forward to meeting your mystery boyfriend, dear," her mother had said, before she hung up. She put her phone back in her purse and then continued staring at Arthur.

"Is something wrong?" he asked, his head tilted slightly, an eyebrow raised, and the distinctive gesture made this new Arthur mesh seamlessly with the one she used to know.

"You look – " she had said, at a loss for words. He had, at her suggestion, not used any pomade on his hair. The Radiohead t-shirt and faded corduroys were completely uncharacteristic of him, as were the faded canvas sneakers. He had kept his usual cologne, though, and the notes of frankincense and black pepper were reassuringly familiar.

"Bad?" he asked, frowning a little after he had put his horn-rimmed glasses on.

"No, no, you look great," she said, nibbling at her lip, "You look so young."

"That was the point, wasn't it?" he asked, tucking his hair behind his ears.

"Yeah, but now we're going to have to convince my mother I'm not picking up jailbait. You're not carrying, are you?" she asked, as an afterthought.

"Of course I am," he said. He turned away from her and retrieved his leather jacket from the coat rack, and she saw that he had tucked the tail of his t-shirt in, hiding the sidearm in its holster tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. Experimentally she reached out and poked him in the middle of his back, finding something stiff and unresisting under her touch.

"You're wearing a ballistic vest under that," she said, sighing as she crossed most of the museums in Paris off of her mental itinerary. "I hope Mom's too tired to go to any museums after dinner, because there's no way we're going to get in the Louvre with that and the guns."

"You're carrying too," he said as he shrugged his jacket on, "so unless you were going to dump the Skyph in the Seine we aren't getting past security anywhere, anyway."

"Fine, you win," she had grumbled, and he had smiled and taken her hand as they stepped out into the street and the evening air. She twined her fingers in his and wondered as they walked, if he had done so because he was supposed to be playing the part of her boyfriend, or if it was because he had really wanted to.

* * *

They met her mother at Chez Toinette, her favorite restaurant in Paris, and probably, Ariadne thought, her favorite restaurant in all of France. She had raved endlessly in email about the duck in sage and honey in the four years since Ariadne had started her graduate studies in Paris. She had arrived before them and had already been seated, and she waved to them as they made their way towards her. She looked much the same as she had in the last round of family photographs Ariadne had received in her email, but her salt-and-pepper hair had a little more salt in it now, and she had gotten a new pair of glasses that exaggerated her usual deadly stare to impressive effect.

"Hey, Mom. This is my date, Arthur." Ariadne had said as they took their places at the table opposite her.

"It's a pleasure to meet you. Dr. Kritzer-Mitchell," Arthur said smoothly as he got Ariadne's chair for her, a gesture that he had never used around her before.

"Please, call me Helen," she said, her smile one of pleasant surprise and approval. "You've got a charming one there, Ari dear. Why have I not heard about him until last week?"

"We were seeing each other on and off for a bit, but we weren't really a going concern until recently," she had said. None of that was strictly untrue if one squinted a little when looking at the facts.

"Well, I'm sure you two were busy," Helen said. The tone of her voice implied that she was referring to more than schoolwork, and Ariadne felt herself blushing a fiery red as the import of that comment hit her.

"Mom!" she had wanted to say, but the waiter brought the menus and wine list just then and she busied herself with staring at her menu until her blush went away.

"I'll never get another word out of her now," Helen said, smiling indulgently at the menu Ariadne held over her face, and then at Arthur. "Your accent is obviously American. New England, I think. How did you two meet, and what are you doing in Paris?"

Ariadne glanced over to Arthur from behind the menu, wondering what he would do faced with her mother's interrogation, but he simply smiled reassuringly at her. "You have a good ear. I was born in Old Greenwich, Connecticut and grew up there. As for your other question, we met while she was doing a work placement – I believe she's told you about it, the one with the nondisclosure agreement. I was working as a consultant for the same client, and that's how we met. We parted ways after the project, and didn't meet again until I attended a talk given by Professor Miles. We started seeing each other then."

The waiter took their orders then, and Helen ordered the duck filet in sage and honey again. She raised her eyebrows in mild surprise as Arthur ordered the roebuck and a bottle of the '96 Château Lafon-Roche in his perfect French.

"So, you work as a business consultant?" Helen asked after the waiter had withdrawn from the table.

"Security consultation, actually, although I do have degrees in Business Management and Art History."

"Where from?"

"Duke University in Durham."

"I used to work with an art historian who taught at Duke, but I don't think you're old enough to be one of his students."

"Dr. Gantt? He's teaching in the UNC college system now, I believe" Arthur said after a moment of thought.

"Well, if you were one of Vincent's students from Duke you must be older than you look," Helen said after a sip of iced water.

"I'm thirty-four, actually," Arthur said easily.

Ariadne watched her mother carefully at that revelation, but if she was surprised she did not show it. "So you went straight from Duke into the business world?"

"Mom, you're interrogating my date again," Ariadne warned, glancing away from her mother to Arthur, who seemed to be taking the grilling in stride.

"No, it's okay," he said, taking Ariadne's hand as in his he did so. "I took a little bit of a detour on the way to a corporate career. I enrolled in ROTC and served with the USAF after I graduated in '99."

"My nephew Cameron serves in the Air Force," Helen said with a faint smile.

"I probably would have stayed career military," Arthur said a little pensively, "but things didn't work out that way."

"What happened, if I may ask?"

"DADT, really. I'd never done anything 'unbecoming to the uniform' while I was an officer, but when one of Dick Cheney's golf buddies tells the brass that you kissed your best friend in high school, they listen."

"That is dreadful, Arthur," Helen said, all sympathy. Both of Ariadne's parents were so liberal they considered the Democrats right wing.

"Well, at least I'll never have to eat another MRE again," he said, and it sounded as though he meant it.

* * *

Things went as well as could be expected, for the most part, and Ariadne's mother was sufficiently distracted by Arthur's clever conversation that she did not launch into the toddler stories. She did, however, warn Arthur never to eat _écrevisse_ – the freshwater crayfish from the Seine, as she heard that they included the occasional John Doe in their diet.

"That was just something you read in a murder mystery novel," Ariadne had protested as she glared at her mother.

"Actually," Arthur said after he swallowed another bite of his venison, "I'm afraid to say that crayfish don't really care what they eat, and if a body were dumped in the Seine they'd probably take bites out of it, too."

"I am never eating anything _a la Nantua_ again," Ariadne said after that, washing the imagined taste out of her mouth with a sip of the excellent Bordeaux.

"So, I've talked all about myself," her mother said, "but I have hardly heard anything about you, Arthur, besides your qualifications, impressive as they are." Arthur saluted her politely with his wineglass, and cut himself another morsel of venison.

"Well, there really isn't much to say," he said after he had chewed and swallowed. "I'm actually kind of a boring man." That was the most blatant lie he had told tonight.

"Well, what about your family?" she asked, despite Ariadne's warning glance.

"I don't really have one," Arthur said. He put his fork down and sipped at his wine again. "Well, no, I lied. Biologically I do have a family, but we don't get along, and we haven't for a long time." An awkward silence fell over the table then, and Ariadne glanced up at Arthur's face, worried. His composure seemed a little rumpled, hastily tucked over a flicker of something that had looked like bitterness in his eyes. Instinctively she reached for his hand and was a little surprised when he returned the gesture and squeezed her fingers tightly.

"Did that have something to do with your discharge from the Air Force?" Helen asked him gently. Ariadne rarely saw her mother looking this sad.

"Yeah," he nodded, "My dad was the one who outed me."

"Your father plays golf with the former Vice-President of the US?" Ariadne asked, all delicacy forgotten as she put two and two together.

"Sometimes, yeah," Arthur said. He squeezed her fingers again and then let go to refill his wineglass. "Sorry I didn't tell you earlier, but I don't really have a reason to talk about my family most of the time."

* * *

Arthur had insisted on paying for dinner, a gesture that Ariadne knew her mother considered sexist at times. He had, however, charmed her enough that she had let him pay for the meal without protesting, which would have been a very good sign if Arthur had really been her date.

"You must come and visit us some day," Helen had said as they left the restaurant. "I'm sure everyone would love to meet you."

"I'd love that," Arthur said, and she kissed him chastely on the cheek before she got in her taxicab. "He's a nice boy. Take care of him, Ari dear," she said, before the door shut.

"I'm doomed," Ariadne said as they watched the taxi vanish into the distance.

"Why?" Arthur asked. He took his horn-rimmed glasses off and tucked the earpiece into his jacket pocket.

"She likes you a lot, and in case you're still in-character, we aren't really dating, which could make things interesting for me if I show up back home without you," Ariadne said as they turned around and headed back to the safe house.

"Just tell her I left you for Eames," Arthur said with a wicked smile, one that provoked an absurd burp of laughter from her.

They finished the rest of the walk in silence, hand-in-hand, and were standing on the front step of the safe house when Ariadne spoke again.

"Hey, Arthur," she said, letting go of his hand so he could get his keys.

"Hm?" He stopped and turned to look at her, keys in his hand.

"All that stuff you told my mom during dinner, the DADT, the New England old money, your dad playing golf with Cheney. Was it the truth?" she asked.

"Most of it, yeah, except for the part about how I met you. Please don't tell anyone else about it." He unlocked the door and held it open for her, and she stepped inside. Eames was nowhere to be seen, but he had left the downstairs light on for them. Arthur stepped into the hallway next and took his glasses out of his pocket before he put his jacket back on the coat rack.

Ariadne gathered her courage for a moment, and then barreled on before she lost her nerve. "You're not boring, you know, Arthur? You're one of the most interesting people I've ever known."

"Thank you," he had said with his usual slight detachment, handing the words over to her like he would a long-stemmed rose. She stepped up to him rashly, in an odd fury that she could not place, and kissed him, her fingers tangling in his fine, messy hair. She missed his mouth at first, caught him on the chin, and then pulled his face down to hers. He did not resist and his mouth was as soft and hot as it had been in the dream, his tongue velvety and slick, faint ghosts of the wine lingering in his breath.

"Mm," he murmured as he pulled away from her, a faint surprise and wistfulness in his dark eyes. "What was that about?"

"The typical post-date kiss," she said, letting go of his neck. The warmth of his skin lingered on her fingers, and she resisted the urge to reach out and touch her hand to the pulse on his neck. "Now we're even."

"Even? What for?" he asked, running his hand through his unruly hair.

"That kiss you stole from me on the Fischer job."

"Hm," he said, tilting his head a little as he thought. "I still think I got the better end of the deal there," and she couldn't help laughing as she climbed the stairs upstairs and walked back to her room.

* * *

Ariadne lay awake in bed, unable to sleep. She told herself that it was nerves over her thesis defense, but after a frustrated half-hour tossing and turning in bed she admitted to herself that it was more than that. She knew that once she went home they would be going on what Arthur had implied would be a suicide mission, and she was furious at her uselessness in the situation. They had kept her safe and alive for nearly two months, taught her to fight and defend herself, and now they were going off to get themselves killed. She made a small growl of annoyance and frustration, crawled out of bed, and shuffled downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of chamomile tea.

The kitchen light was on, and she found Eames and Arthur seated at their usual places at the table, talking quietly over the contents of a manila folder and a large map. Arthur glanced up at her as she entered and gathered the papers up, ostensibly to clear her some space at the table. She knew better. He was trying to protect her from learning too much about what they would be doing in Russia.

"Can't sleep?" he asked, and she nodded mutely while she tried to articulate, mentally, what she had wanted to say. In the end she gave up and filled the kettle for some tea, and then sat down at her end of the table on Arthur's left.

"I'm worried about you two," she said after a few moments of awkward silence, as Eames folded the map. She noticed that he folded it up the same way it had come, along the pre-creased lines so nobody could look at it and tell where he had been planning on going.

"You don't have to be, love," Eames said as he put the map back down. He had dark circles around his eyes from lack of sleep, but his gaze was bright and alert, which made her suspect that he was flushing his painkillers again.

She bit her lip, and then looked at the both of them as the kettle seethed quietly in the background. "You know what they say, right? 'Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.'"

Arthur looked as though he wanted to say something, to contradict her, but Eames shook his head and warned him off. "This isn't about revenge," he said, after Arthur leaned back in his chair and let him speak. "Not for the both of us anyway. This is about how the business works."

"You don't want to survive any kind of assassination attempt without punitive payback," Arthur explained, "Otherwise people will start thinking you're too weak to fight back and this leads to individuals trying to take advantage of you."

"So like the mutually-assured destruction of the Cold War," Ariadne said, glancing back and forth between them.

"Rather like it, yes," Eames said, "'Honor among thieves' only really happens if it's enforced by overwhelming force. Otherwise, it's survival of the fittest, and the extraction world, like Nature, is red in tooth and claw"

She felt her internal balance tip for a moment, and then looked fiercely up at Arthur, and at Eames. "You're going to need a good architect for this. I'm coming along with you."

"It's dangerous. I can't let you do that," Arthur said, his tone a little sharper than before.

"More dangerous than the past two months?" she asked, staring him down.

"It could be," Eames said. "We are dealing with rather nasty individuals here."

"I still think I'd rather take my chances with the both of you than go back to the US and be murdered by the people you're after," she said, as the kettle started whistling. She pushed her chair back and got up to take it off the burner.

Arthur let out a long, tired sigh and reached up to rub at his face with his hands. "I know I'm not going to dissuade you if you have your mind set on this," he said, his voice slightly muffled. "Even Cobb couldn't resist you when you wanted to come along on the Fischer job. But what's to stop us from just packing up and leaving without you?"

"I don't think you should do that, Arthur," Eames said. "You'd just be treating her like a child again, and I think she has the right to make this choice."

Arthur sighed again and then turned in his chair to look at her. "If you do this, and come along with us, you're never going to be free of the extraction world, you understand? You might never be able to return to a normal life. Is that what you really want?"

"No," she said, and stilled her trembling hands with an effort of will. "That isn't what I want, but it's better than turning my back on the both of you as you go into some kind of suicide mission."

"We'll talk about this more later," Eames said, "but before you go to bed I want you to remember your Milton."

"John Milton? _Paradise Lost?"_ she asked, unsure of the point he was driving at.

"'Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost'," he said, softly and simply, the slight hoarseness in his voice underscoring the line better than any theatrical flair could.

"I'll take that under advisement," she said, her face set and hard, her hands curled into fists at her sides.

"I hope to God you don't come to regret this later," Arthur said, pride, frustration and worry warring in his eyes and the tone of his voice.

* * *

Ariadne was back at her own apartment in Kléber, packing her bags several days after a successful thesis defense. She had already boxed up the majority of her stuff and sent it ahead of her to her parents' house, and she guessed she'd collect it when she found her own place to live. A soft scratching at her window made her look up, and she saw her landlady's large orange cat sticking its head through the drapes. It mewed softly when it saw her, and then leapt onto her bed and onto the floor and butted its head against her ankles.

"Hey, you," she said affectionately before she picked it up like a baby. The cat purred loudly as she did so and settled down in her arms with its paws on her shoulder, and she patted it for a few moments as she looked around at the empty strangeness of her apartment. She had spent four years of her life here, a time that felt rather dreamlike to her now that it was drawing to a close. She did not reach for her totem, however. She knew enough to know that this was reality, and if it was a dream, it was probably her own.

"I'm going to miss you when I'm gone, you know, you big orange lardball?" she whispered to the cat, who mewed softly in reply, as though it understood English (which it didn't.)

There was a soft tap at the door and she put the cat down gently and dusted the fur off her blouse before she went to the door and checked the peephole, mindful of the Skyph holstered behind her right hip. Arthur was standing outside on the landing with a manila envelope in his hands, and she turned the bolt and opened the door to let him in.

"Hey," he said, glancing a little suspiciously at the cat, which in accordance with the instincts of its kind, went immediately to demand caresses from the one person in the room who was in fact allergic to cats.

"I'm ready," she told him as she shut the door behind him. "Everything's packed."

"Yeah," he said, looking around at the empty bookshelf and wardrobe and the bare hardwood floor. He handed the manila envelope to her, and she opened it up and took a look inside. Resting within it was a plane ticket to Helsinki, booked in her own name, and a brand-new American passport. The photograph in it was hers, but the name and address were not. She knew enough about Arthur's connections to know that this was a legitimate passport, and that it would likely stand up to the biometric checks performed at most airports. "There's still enough time to turn around and go back to the US," he told her. "Once you do this, there's no turning back."

She flipped through the pages of the passport, looked at the stamps in it, a fictitious travel history for a fictitious woman. England, Andorra, Spain. Luxembourg, France, Finland. "I'm ready," she said, tucking her new passport in the money belt she wore around her waist, under her shirt.

Arthur bit his lip, as though he were about to say something more, but did not. He took her suitcase instead and opened the apartment door for her. "Let's go, Ms. Elliot," he said, using the name on her new passport, "We have a flight to catch."

Ariadne picked up her backpack and overnight bag and stepped out of her apartment. As she did so she paused on the threshold and turned back to glance at the cat grooming itself in the middle of the room, and then shut the door behind her with a soft click.


End file.
